Now celebrating 15 years of exhibiting experimental contemporary art, Locust Projects is pleased to present the second year of the LAB MFA, a program selecting a Florida-based MFA student through an open call to create an exhibition in the Project Room. This year, current FIU student Nick Gilmore will present Quick Millennia, a performance-based installation in which the artist will create a series of monotype prints on site by rolling over paper with an industrial asphalt roller. Reclaimed commercial paint and construction debris are applied to the floor of the Project Room, covered with paper and padding, and subsequently run over by the machine.

The resultant prints will then hang throughout the Project Room for the duration of the exhibition from a wooden framework suspended from the ceiling, with marks on the printing area of the floor left as a residue of the performances. In a time of increasing ecological scrutiny, Quick Millennia attempts to recontextualize human action and industrial processes, exaggerating the binaries of culture vs. nature and ultimately showing their interconnectedness. The exhibition explores the Marxian concept of the ‘metabolic rift’, which supposes that humans are distinct from nature based on the argument that civilization’s manipulation of the land is fundamentally opposed to the self-sustaining cycle of nature. Yet, in alignment with the seminal land artist Robert Smithson, Quick Millennia also questions whether any human activity could be unnatural, exploring the paradoxical human characteristic of ‘destructive progress’.

ABOUT THE ARTIST:

Nick Gilmore (b. 1978, Mobile, AL) is currently enrolled in the MFA program at Florida International University. His work incorporates aspects of sociobiology, ecology, blue-collar labor, and Taoism. His background includes extensive work in the fields of construction and woodworking. He has worked with artists Sue de Beer and Ryan Trecartin, fabricating elements for their video projects. Nick has participated in several group shows in Brooklyn, New York; this is his first solo exhibition.