NICOLAS LOBO – D.O.W.
Gallery Wendi Norris will host Hesse McGraw, San Francisco Art Institute’s Vice President of Exhibitions and Public Programs, in conversation with Claire Healy & Sean Cordeiro and Nicolas Lobo. The event is free and open to the public.
Nicolas Lobo’s interdisciplinary practice examines the peculiar life-cycles of various mass-produced consumer goods. Purple cough syrup, breakfast cereal, energy drinks, and donut frosting are just some of the unorthodox substances he reduces to their chemical substrates in order to recast them in customized distribution networks of his own devise.
Lobo’s first exhibition at Gallery Wendi Norris, D.O.W., features three “Napalm Scholar Stones” sitting on terrazzo pedestals, amplified in scale to approximate the human body and situated irregularly in the space in the manner of traditional Zen rock gardens. Originally conceived as objects of contemplation, meditation and inspiration among painters and poets in China at least as far back as the Song dynasty (960-1270), traditional scholar rocks or scholar stones, as they came to be known, are miniature, executive-desktop scaled versions of their much larger outdoor cousins, designed to bring the beauty of nature indoors as a spur to the creative act.
Physically reminiscent of coral reefs as well as the majestic mountain ranges they were initially meant to evoke, the pocked and dimpled surfaces of these crusty biomorphic forms instill a quiet reverie courtesy of their perfect fusion of the celestial and the cellular, the transcendental and the geological. It is a blissful moment of peak experience that Lobo wishes to disrupt.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Nicolas Lobo was born in Los Angeles in 1979. He graduated from the Cooper Union in 2004 and lives and works in Miami. Fluent in all media, Lobo produces sculptures, installations, videos, performances, photographs, and works on paper through which he aims to represent the unrepresentable. Radio waves, social networks, no-fly zones, electromagnetic fields, and sound are among the immaterial elements he has transmuted into physical forms.
Lobo has exhibited at MOCA, North Miami; Perez Art Museum (Miami); BASS Museum (Miami); The Fabric Workshop (Philadelphia, PA); the de la Cruz Collection (Miami); Locust Projects (Miami); Marlborough Chelsea (New York); and Lisa Cooley Gallery (New York). His work has been covered by Artforum, Black Book, Art Papers, and Interview Magazine, among others. He is in the collection of the Perez Art Museum; MOCA, North Miami; and the de la Cruz Collection.