The Museum of Contemporary Art hosts Comprehensive Solo exhibition of Luis Gispert

Written by Jeff Scanlan Sunday, 26 June 2011 23:01

MIAMI, FL - The Museum of Contemporary Art presents the first comprehensive solo museum exhibition of Luis Gispert. The exhibition features large-scale photographs, videos, sculpture and film, dating from 1999 to the present, and will be on view at the museum’s satellite gallery, MOCA at Goldman Warehouse in the Wynwood Art District, (404 NW 26 Street, Miami, 305.893.6211), from April 11 to June 27. The exhibition is organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami and is curated by MOCA Executive Director and Chief Curator Bonnie Clearwater.

Luis Gispert was born in Jersey City, New Jersey in 1972 and was raised in Miami. “This exhibition provides the opportunity to reflect on the past nine years of work,” said Bonnie Clearwater, MOCA Executive Director and exhibition curator. “Previous critical analyses focused primarily on the multi-cultural and hip hop imagery in his work. This exhibition highlights the psychological romanticism and connection to the conventions of filmmaking that has persisted throughout Gispert’s career.” In much of his work, Gispert aimed to reclaim the powerful visceral, acoustical, and psychological impact he experienced as a youth watching films by Luis Bunuel, Federico Fellini, and Michelangelo Antonioni. He is driven to create work that lives up to the cinematic sublime.

Gispert describes the first ten years of his career as a period during which he underwent a personal transformation in his attempt to comprehend why certain objects and events strike him physically and emotionally. Always, there is the push- and-pull between seduction and aggression in his work that inundates the viewer’s senses. His photographs, videos, films and sculptures are complex, composed arrangements that delve into the familiar and the unknown, the mainstream and the marginalized, to expose and address the various subcultures that infiltrate the mainstream.

Gispert’s cheerleader series of lush, color photographs depicting cheerleaders accessorized with the hip hop gold chains and jewelry, first brought him to the art world’s attention. Although this series was perceived as a reference to popular culture and cultural identity, Gispert approached the subject from the perspective of Baroque religious paintings depicting levitating saints at moments of epiphany and the conventions of sports photography, which established the iconic image of the sports hero in mid-air. The cheerleader photographs were achieved with cinematic techniques and methods to produce special effects, most notably the green-screen.

Filmmaking has played a major role in Gispert’s career. He has consistently contrasted films that use the syntax of cinema as exercises in the manipulation of sound, image and film time, as in Stereomongrel, 2005 and Smother, 2008, with raw, aggressive videos that deliberately contradict film conventions.

The exhibition opens with Gispert’s most recent work, a three-channel film entitled Rene, 2008 that marks a new chapter for Gispert. In this multi-media installation he moves away from the self-analysis and narrative of his previous film Smother to make an intimate cinematic portrait of a friend in which he aimed to subdue the craft of filmmaking in a search for purity. Gispert followed Rene and filmed him in his daily routines for a week. The film is projected on three screens simultaneously. “Although there is no narrative structure there is an arch of action from waking up, to eating breakfast, going to work, and then going to sleep,” notes Gispert. He avoided using techniques that would pull the viewer into the film.

Gispert attended Miami-Dade Community College before receiving his BFA from The School of the Art Institute in Chicago and an MFA in Sculpture from Yale University. His earliest creative recognition was tied to his participation in a group of young South Florida-based artists who challenged the reigning paradigms of Latino representation. Gispert's vividly colored photographs and booming sound sculptures have since been shown widely throughout the United States as well as in Europe, South America, and the Middle East including the Royal Academy of Arts, London, Whitney Museum of American Art, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, Brooklyn Museum of Art, and Studio Museum of Harlem.

MOCA at Goldman Warehouse is located at 404 NW 26th Street, Miami, FL 33127. Hours of MOCA at Goldman Warehouse are Wednesday through Saturday from noon to 5 pm. MOCA at Goldman Warehouse is also open on the second Saturday of each month from 7 to 10 pm. Admission to MOCA at Goldman Warehouse is by donation. For additional information, call 305.893.6211 or visit www.mocanomi.org

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