. Conversations at the Edge (CATE)

Luis Gispert: Hyperreal

Posted by | Conversations at the Edge | Posted on | October 15, 2010

Thursday, October 21, 6 p.m. | Luis Gispert in person!

Réne (Luis Gispert, 2008). Image courtesy the artist.
Réne (Luis Gispert, 2008). Image courtesy the artist.

In his dramatic photographic tableaux, sculptures, video vignettes, and short films, Miami-New York-based artist and SAIC alumnus Luis Gispert (BFA ’96) mashes up consumerist pop culture and narco-nouveau riche ‘80s aesthetics with Freudian nightmares and socio-economic provocation. Gispert, writes Edwin Stirman in Art in America, “aims for a new kind of baroque drama and satire by contrasting beauty and grotesquerie.” This evening, Gispert will provide an overview of this work in all mediums, including his 2008 film, Smother, and the multi-channel portrait, Réne (2008). Set in 1980s Miami, Smother follows the adolescent Waylon, boombox in tow, on a kaleidoscopic and macabre journey out of his overbearing mother’s clutches into a magical-realist nightmare world of his own making. Réne is an intimate, inventive study of family friend and Cuban émigré Réne as he goes about his daily routine in Miami Florida. Co-presented by Parlor Room, a visiting artist and lecture series created, run, budgeted and curated by graduate students in SAIC’s Photography Department. Luis Gispert, 2001-08, USA, multiple formats, ca. 75 min (plus discussion).

LUIS GISPERT (1972, Jersey City) creates art through a wide range of media, including photographs, film, sounds, and sculptures, touching upon hip-hop and youth culture, as well as Cuban-American history.  His work has been exhibited internationally, including in the 2002 Whitney Biennial, New York; the Brooklyn Museum of Art; the Studio Museum in Harlem; Art Pace, San Antonio, TX; the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami; the Contemporary Art Museum Houston; Palazzo Brocherasio in Turin; the Royal Academy in London; National Museum of Poznan, Poland; and Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, Germany. His works are in the collections of the New Museum of Contemporary Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum , and the Whitney Museum of American Art. He received an MFA at Yale University in 2001 and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1996.  From 1990-92, he attended Miami Dade College.  He is represented by Mary Boone Gallery in New York, Rhona Hoffman Gallery in Chicago, and Frederic Snitzer Gallery in Miami.