Locust Projects is pleased to announce an exhibition by New York-based artist Meredyth Sparks, featuring the artist’s first video animation and large-scale installation to-date.

Sparks’ process is grounded in a concept she calls extraction, which highlights the gesture of cutting and removing material from an image or an object, emphasizing the spatial relationships that unfold. Through this process the artist reconsiders the contemporary political and aesthetic relevance of images originating in musical subcultures, the historical avant-garde, and the ever-evolving legacies of labor and gender.

In the entryway gallery Sparks will transform Eileen Gray’s Rivoli tea table into an architectural structure composed entirely of lengths of string. Large enough for a viewer to walk under, the installation alters perception of scale and sense of interior vs. exterior space. As the central motif of the exhibition, a labyrinthine mutli-paneled screen in the main gallery leads to various collage works and a projected video animation visible through the structure’s semi-permeable walls. Presenting another compression of physical space, the animation illustrates the multi-dimensional flight of humming birds and their unique ability to hover in the air in all directions, a motion akin to the circulation of images in contemporary culture.

Meredyth Sparks was born in Panama City, Florida, in 1972. Sparks currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She earned her B.F.A. from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and her M.F.A. from Hunter College, NY. Sparks has exhibited widely in international galleries and museums, including solo gallery exhibitions at Veneklasen Werner, Berlin; Galerie Catherine Bastide, Brussels and Galerie Frank Elbaz, Paris, among others. She has been included in group exhibitions at ICA, Boston; CAPC Museum of Contemporary Art, Bordeaux; Les Recontres d’Arles Photographie, Arles; Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea, Santiago de Compostela and The 2nd Moscow Biennial. In 2009, Monografik Editions published the artist’s first monograph, with texts by Nicolas Bourriaud and Robert Hobbs. Sparks is represented by Elizabeth Dee Gallery in New York.

Locust Projects’ exhibitions and programming are made possible with the support from: The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; Galt & Skye Mikesell; Hannibal Cox Jr. Foundation; John S. and James L. Knight Foundation; Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs, the Cultural Affairs Council, the Mayor, and the Miami-Dade County Board of County Commissioners. Special thanks: Elizabeth Dee Gallery, New York.