Inside Locust Projects’ Daniel Arsham installation & Basel Kickstarter campaign – Knight Foundation
Arts

Inside Locust Projects’ Daniel Arsham installation & Basel Kickstarter campaign

By Angelica Arbelaez, Locust Projects

Locust Projects will produce a major new installation by New York-based artist Daniel Arsham in his hometown, Miami.  For the installation, entitled Welcome to the Future, Arsham transforms the gallery into an excavation site, digging a trench in the gallery’s floor that holds thousands of calcified artifacts—a muted cacophony of 20th century media devices. Mounds of boom boxes, electric guitars, SLR cameras, Blackberries, Nintendo controllers, VHS tapes, Walkmans, film projectors, and portable televisions, rendered in crystal, volcanic ash, and other minerals fill the pit, collapsing linear narratives of past, present, and future. The trench presents the recent past as archeology, a world of technological objects whose obsolescence was built into their design, preserved like petrified wood or the figures of Pompeii. Arsham presents these devices as a mass below our feet, in a grand gesture that rewrites narratives of production, history, and discovery.

In conjunction with this exhibition, Locust Projects has been selected to participate in Art Basel ‘s Crowdfunding Initiative, a partnership with Kickstarter to support non-profit visual arts organizations worldwide. The initiative was announced in The New York Times in September and has seen great results for a select group of fantastic, internationally-based organizations.

Since it’s launch on November 4, the campaign has successfully raised nearly 25% of its goal. Check out the great perks for becoming involved. To learn more visit: kickstarter.com/artbasel

Welcome to the Future is made possible with major support from: John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Espirito Santo Bank, Galerie Perrotin New York.