January 27, 2007 — April 22, 2007
Salina, Kansas - In conjunction with the Salina Art Center’s current exhibition Situation Comedy: Humor in Recent Art, Luis Gispert will give an overview of his past and recent bodies of work and discuss his video Block Watching, featured in the exhibit, at 7:00pm on Thursday, April 5, at the Art Center Cinema.
Luis Gispert, an American sculptor and photographer living and working in Brooklyn, New York, creates videos, photographs and sculptures influenced by his adolescent experiences of hip hop street culture as a Cuban-American growing up in Miami. His work investigates authenticity, materialism, and the humorous intersections between different class and cultural systems. Gispert earned an MFA at Yale University in 2001, with a 1996 BFA in Film from the Art Institute of Chicago, and attended Miami Dade College from 1990 to 1992.
Situation Comedy: Humor in Recent Art presents more than sixty works – video and sound installations, paintings, sculptures, drawings and photographs – by younger as well as more established contemporary artists who inject a healthy dose of humor, both light-hearted and dark, into their work. Dealing with themes as varied as embarrassment, cruelty, and pranks, they utilize the leveling power of comedy to break down barriers and question authority, with comedy serving as a foil for more substantive questions about current events, the human condition, and the art world itself.
Artist at Work is made possible in part by the Horizons Grants Program, Salina Arts & Humanities Commission, City of Salina. Situation Comedy is a traveling exhibition organized and circulated by Independent Curators International (iCI), New York. The exhibition was curated by Dominic Molon and Michael Rooks, and the exhibition, tour and catalog are made possible, in part, by grants from the Elizabeth Firestone Graham Foundation and the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation, with additional support from the iCI International Associates and the iCI independents.
For more information regarding Luis Gispert’s presentation contact the Salina Art Center at 785-827-1431, or visit our website at http://www.salinaartcenter.org. The Art Center is located at 242 S. Santa Fe, Salina, Kansas, and the Cinema is located at 150 S. Santa Fe. Business office hours are from 9:00am – 5:00pm, Monday through Friday. Art Center galleries are open from noon – 5:00pm, Wednesday through Saturday, and 1:00 – 5:00pm on Sunday.
Salina Art Center programs, exhibitions and films are presented in part by the Kansas Arts Commission, a state agency, and by the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency which believes that a great nation deerves great art.