Ruben Ochoa: Cores & Cutouts / Locust Projects, Miami / Interview

Cores and Cutouts is Los Angeles-based artist Ruben Ochoa’s first solo exhibition in Miami, Florida. For his show at Locust Projects he created a new site-specific installation using the building’s substructure as source material. In this video, Ruben Ochoa talks about his new work.

Ruben Ochoa is known for using building materials such as concrete and steel. At Locust Projects he cut through the concrete floor to expose subterranean cross-sections of the gallery’s foundation, revealing the space where earth and architecture intersect. Cored segments of the concrete floor are sitting like flowers on steel columns above their normal resting place and the heads of the gallery’s visitors, resembling abstract paintings.

Ruben Ochoa was born in Oceanside, California in 1974. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles. Recent exhibitions include a two person show at the San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA, 2011; and group exhibitions in the FGAP @ Venice, Collateral Event of the 54th International Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, Palazzo Papadopoli, Venice, Italy, 2011; and The Artist’s Museum: Los Angeles Artists 1980-2010, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA, 2010. Ochoa has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, CA, 2010; Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, LA, 2010; Charles H. Scott Gallery at Emily Carr University, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, 2009; and Site Santa Fe, NM, 2009. Ochoa was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY and the 2004 California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, CA. He has been awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, 2008 and a Creative Capital Foundation Grant, 2005. Upcoming exhibitions include his first solo exhibition at James Cohan Gallery, NY in the spring of 2012. The exhibition at Locust Projects runs until January 28, 2011.

Locust Projects is a not-for-profit exhibition space founded by three Miami artists in 1998 in order to provide contemporary visual artists the freedom to experiment with new ideas and methods without the limitations of conventional exhibition spaces.

Ruben Ochoa: Cores & Cutouts. Locust Projects, Miami. Interview with Ruben Ochoa on the occasion of the Reception for the Artist, coinciding with Art Basel Miami Beach 2011. Miami / USA, December 1, 2011.

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