MOCA at Goldman Warehouse. Luis Gispert

Apr 11th through Jun 27th, 2009


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 is on view at the museum’s satellite gallery, MOCA at Goldman Warehouse in the Wynwood Art District.

Luis Gispert was born in Jersey City, New Jersey in 1972 and was raised in Miami. 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. These subjects also provided him the means to explore the sheer aggressiveness and excessiveness of the hip-hop ornamentation or the effusively decorated interior of his immigrant family’s homes.

His most recent photographs of landscapes viewed through the windows of customized vehicles achieve the widescreen grandeur of CinemaScope film and provide the viewer the sensation of occupying the driver’s seat. He shot hundreds of sheets of film for each landscape in an attempt to capture the perfect vista, but ultimately photo shopped various details to produce landscapes that most closely adhered to his ideal.

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 the artist. 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’s vividly colored photographs and booming sound sculptures have been shown nationally, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, Brooklyn Museum of Art, and Studio Museum of Harlem.