NinaJohnson

Nicolas Lobo’s art maps the conduits linking flesh to industry, the porous bedrock beneath cities dedicated to banal leisure and amorphous capital. For the past nine years he has lived in Miami, creating objects out of systems clotted to a trickle. A terrazzo sculpture models the flight path of planes descending into Miami International Airport. Scholar stones made of homemade napalm float atop thousands of bottles of an expired aphrodisiac energy drink. Fifty-gallon barrels of bootleg celebrity perfume douse a downtown intersection with a personality fog. Lobo’s constant material experimentation reveals the obscured connections between our own bodies and the networks of pleasure and power extending past all horizons.

This spring, his most ambitious project takes place at Red Bull Studios New York, as part of BIO:DIP(February 20 – April 17), a two-person exhibition with Hayden Dunham curated by Neville Wakefield. For the show, Lobo acquired three spa-sized swimming pools and used them as molds to cast sculptures formed out of homemade soap. The pools were then inverted and placed within the exhibition space to display the soap sculptures. Additionally, he obscured the windows overlooking the street with a heavy layer of lipstick sourced from an industrial cosmetics lab. On the occasion of BIO:DIP, he spoke to the Miami Rail’s founding editor, Hunter Braithwaite, about his work.

The full interview can be found in print or online, here.