Locust Projects is pleased to present Welcome to the Future, a major site-specific installation by Daniel Arsham. For the installation, 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 “new media” devices as a mass below our feet, in a grand gesture that rewrites narratives of production, history, and discovery.

Arsham is known for his sculptural and architectural works, which warp or destabilize recognizable structures and forms with playfulness and wit. As a child, the artist survived Hurricane Andrew huddled in a closet of his family’s Miami home. The wreckage he encountered in the storm’s aftermath had a profound impact on his perception of architectural spaces and contemporary objects, which melt and crumble in his installations, leaving the viewer with the impression that a millennium has passed in an instant.

Daniel Arsham (born 1980, Cleveland, OH) employs elements of architecture, performance, and sculpture to manipulate and distort understandings of structures and space. Arsham became widely known at the age of 25 when he was asked to design his first of several sets for Merce Cunningham’s productions. He is also active as one half of the art and architecture collaborative Snarkitecture, along with Alex Mustonen, and frequently collaborates with choreographer Jonah Bokaer. After graduating from Cooper Union, Arsham returned to Miami and helped found the seminal artist-run spaces The House and Placemaker gallery. Arsham’s work has been exhibited at Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin in Paris and Miami, Storefront for Art and Architecture and Sean Kelly Gallery in New York, the 2nd Athens Biennial in Athens, Greece, and Miami Art Museum and Museum of Contemporary art in Miami.

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. Special thanks: Mario Cader-Frech & Robert Wennett, Charles Coleman, Collecteurs, Jacqueline Green, Evelyn & Bruce Greer, Diane & Werner Grob, Jennifer & Brian Heller, Krillion Ventures, Melissa Krinzman, Carlos Lago, Olga & Vicente Lago, Rochelle & Steven Lanster, Museo Vault, Alex Menendez, Susan & Dennis Richard, Bonnie Teller Swerdloff, Debbie Wechsler.

All images: Installation view at Locust Projects, Miami. Photo credit: Zack Balber with Ginger Photography Inc.