Miami, FL – August 11, 2020 – Miami’s longest-running nonprofit alternative art space, Locust Projects is an incubator of new art and ideas. They produce, present, and nurture ambitious and experimental new art and the exchange of ideas through commissioned exhibitions and projects, artist residencies, summer art intensives for teens, and public programs on contemporary art and curatorial practice. Locust Projects emphasizes boundary-pushing creative endeavors, risk-taking and experimentation by local, national and international artists.
As this year marks the Centennial of Women’s Right to Vote, Locust Projects’ 2020-2021 Main Gallery exhibitions by strong female artists, including Mette Tommerup, Juana Valdes, GeoVanna Gonzalez, and Christina Pettersson, honor the role of women, past and present, as change-makers. Each artist, utilizing their own mediums and personal backgrounds, have created compelling, thought-provoking works meant to shed light and create a dialogue about certain topics such as immigration, equity, environmental awareness, queer-identity, gender, and race.
Christina Pettersson’s In The Pines will be featured from July – August 2020; Juana Valdes’s Rest Ashore will be from September – October 2020; Mette Tommerup’s Made By Dusk will be from November 2020-Jan 2021; GeoVanna Gonzalez’s HOW TO: Oh, look at me will be shown from February -April 2021.
WRE went behind the scenes with each artist to discuss their upcoming exhibitions and the driving force behind their respective pieces. Read the full Q&A below.
WRE: Tell us about your project, Made By Dusk, at Locust Projects. What will visitors see, hear, feel/experience?
Mette Tommerup: Made By Dusk is a space inspired by the Nordic Goddess, Freya, the untamed goddess of love, war, beauty, gold, and transformation. Upon entering the installation, the visitor is met with walls covered in flickering light and shadows cast from suspended golden wire sculptures shaped as Freya’s chariot-pulling cats. Beyond lies a great gray and golden hall to evoke the in-between space of twilight or dusk, with walls draped in massive tapestries surrounding a floating amphitheater of seats facing a central throne. In Norse mythology, Freya’s Hall of Seats would receive fallen warriors, here it is a place of refuge and inward reflection and gathering of feminine forces and transformative powers needed to battle inequities and injustices.
WRE: What has the opportunity at Locust Projects enabled you to do that you were not able to before?
MT: The opportunity to develop an immersive installation in the Main Gallery at Locust Projects has allowed me to push my practice in both scale and in working with new materials and techniques. At first it was an opportunity to reflect upon where we are as women in 2020, a year commemorating the centennial of the women’s right to vote and being aspirational about what we can continue to achieve. As this year has evolved, and we continue to witness basic rights being denied and stripped away, it’s become a chance to build a forum for a dialogue for how women, like Freya was, can be the catalyst for transformative change in the world today.
WRE: What do you hope people take away from experiencing your project, either in person or virtually?
MT: I’m hoping to empower the visitor by transporting them to an otherworldly space akin to an experience at an antiquities wing at a museum or an otherworldly place. An escape where the visitor allows themselves to get lost with a sense of wonder and awe that can prompt new thinking. I would like them to find components of the installation evoking a sensual and celebratory air, while offering a space to tackle more serious issues connected to liberating and raising diverse voices and supporting creative transformational change.