Now celebrating 15 years of exhibiting experimental contemporary art, Locust Projects is pleased to present Out of Place, a two-person exhibition in the Project Room curated by Joanna Kleinberg Romanow, Assistant Curator, The Drawing Center, New York. The exhibition features Tracey Goodman and Valerie Snobeck, two contemporary practitioners invested in spatial critiques through site-specific installation. Both artists utilize space—exploring it as both a site of restriction and liberation—to create distinctive, environmental footprints that present philosophical ideas about how we encounter the world.

Snobeck looks to Miami’s ocean front as inspiration for En Femme 7, an abstraction on handmade paper derived from peeling the plastic laminate off photographic prints recycled from the artist’s archive. The small drawing rests on a low plinth custom-built to the same dimensions of an opened “ostrich” beach chair--a gesture that is suggestive of a supine sunbather. The chaise-like platform evokes Miami’s shoreline as well as the debris often spotted at the beach (i.e. plastic bottles and bags). With nearly eighty percent of marine litter being plastic, Snobeck poses a more profound question about how we experience the natural world. En Femme 7 extends into the area’s neighboring beaches and asks the viewer to consider its’ out-of-place plastic—should it remain as is, accumulate or be removed?

In this, Snobeck arms the viewer with an observable reality suffused withinfinite interpretation. For Goodman, the process often involves making casts or imprints of her physical surroundings. She develops a personalized narrative in response to the everyday detritus that she happens upon. As Goodman puts it, “The fragments left from specific events or experiences, these are the bits of information I am interested in, for what they can tell us about who we are and where we come from.”For this exhibition, Goodman cuts a window-sized hole directly into the gallery’s wall, which she embeds with tropical flowers and fruits indigenous to the region. There is a long time in me between knowing and telling (Grace Paley), stems from the artist’s experience of walking around Miami’s design district where she discovered a number of over-grown residential backyards. The lush environs to Goodman felt like an extension of a domestic dwelling, which she captures in the playful inclusion of vegetation amongst the concrete gallery—defining the space, but also eating away at it. There is a poetics to this sculptural reversal: to conceal is to reveal, and the border between inside and outside comes undone. Out of Place showcases two carefully calibrated installations that necessitate a spatial consciousness achieved through embodied movement and a sustained vision. Both artists’ inquiries into the relationships between the edifices, colors, and vistas that they encounter open up to a purified way of understanding and traversing the world, in which location becomes a site of habitation as well as existence.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Tracey Goodman (b. 1970, Warren, OH) is a Brooklyn-based artist who received an MFA from New York University in 2009 and a BS from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1996. She was recently the focus of a solo exhibition at Regina Rex, Queens (2011), and her work has been included in various group exhibitions including the Freedman Gallery, Albright College, Reading, Pennsylvania (2012); Court Square Gallery and Project Space, Long Island City, Queens (2011); and St. Cecilia’s Convent, Brooklyn, New York (2010).

Valerie Snobeck (b. 1980, Wadena, MN) is a New York–based artist who received her MFA from the University of Chicago in 2008, her BFA from Saint Cloud State University, Minnesota in 2003 and studied at Palacky University, Czech Republic in 2009. Her recent solo exhibitions include Kiehle Hall, Saint Cloud University, Minnesota (2013); The University of Chicago Smart Museum of Art (2012); Le Consortium, Dijon, France (2012); ESSEX STREET, New York (2012); Galerie Catherine Bastide, Brussels, Belgium (2011); and the University of Delaware Art Museum (2011).