Fantastical and surreal, Luis Gispert’s photographic and video amalgams are visually rich explorations of cultural codes. Featuring eleven large-scale glossy photographs from two recent series and two looped videos, Gispert’s exhibition at Artpace illustrates a concern with, and critique of, various...
[more]Fantastical and surreal, Luis Gispert’s photographic and video amalgams are visually rich explorations of cultural codes. Featuring eleven large-scale glossy photographs from two recent series and two looped videos, Gispert’s exhibition at Artpace illustrates a concern with, and critique of, various urban subcultures in America today.
As a young Cuban-American, the artist brings an insider’s perspective to an investigation of ethnic youth culture, exposing incipient ties to music, power and gangland activity by constructing modern tableaux based on the iconography of Western religious art, specifically, from the Baroque and Renaissance periods. Asserting that hip hop is the contemporary Baroque, Gispert adopts signifiers from that subculture to address societal views and investigate identity politics.
Utilizing what is a somewhat fetishized figure, the cheerleader, and removing her from her normal conditions, Gispert draws in tangential issues of sex, drugs and gang warfare in a slightly humorous and innocuous way. He poses young women in cheerleading outfits—primarily Latinas—against vivid, chroma-key green backgrounds in seemingly minimal compositions. On closer view, however, details emerge—gaudy gold jewelry, makeup and elaborate body positions (often set-ups with suspension wires)—substantiating an intricately layered underlying concept. These are not simple documentary photographs; instead, they are complex, composed arrangements that delve into the familiar and the unknown, the mainstream and the marginalized, to expose and address the various subcultures currently infiltrating the mainstream.
Gispert also attempts, while using the social leveler of a uniform (in this case short pleated skirts, short socks, gym shoes and V-necked sleeveless sweaters), to erase the sense of “other” so pervasive in our society. Functioning as a critique of race relations and varying levels of marginalization, Gispert’s work also addresses hip hop’s trajectory from an African-American subculture adopted by Latinos, to its current place in the mainstream. The artist’s inclusion of excessive bling bling and various gangland signifiers—guns, hand signals—is indicative of this crossover.
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