Commissioned for one of the Perez Art Museum’s project galleries, The Leisure Pit is a site-based installation encompassing a group of mixed-media sculptures. The artist cast these works inside a swimming pool using an experimental process. The ensemble relates to Lobo’s interest in the intersections among cultural, technological, and corporeal systems of consumption. Lobo’s point of departure is a set of concrete forms derived from massive storm drain components, reduced to human scale. To produce the final sculptures, Lobo interlocks these forms with the molds that he used to make them. The outer shells of these molds comprise another level of imagery, including an outsized pill shape bearing the Versace logo—a reference to a legendary strain of the drug Ecstasy—as well as satellite dishes bearing the imprints of a human hand. By turning a swimming pool—the epitome of affluent suburban recreation—into a facility for industrial manufacture, Lobo points to the demands of private leisure activities on public infrastructural systems.
