Locust Projects is pleased to present Stone Underground, an exhibition of new work by Los Angeles-based artist Jedediah Caesar. Known for conceptual sculpture that mimics geological forms and processes, Caesar presents a new series of sculptures that extract inspiration from Miami’s subterranean realm.
At the center of Stone Underground are Caesar’s Sovereign Stones – dyed blocks of the Oolite, Florida Keystone and Hemingway limestones that form the bedrock of South Florida. These chunks of fossilized coral reef and seashell sediment were excavated from a vast underground field, and their colors reflect the US Geological Survey’s Lithclass mapping legend for Florida. Once extracted from the bedrock, indexically color-coded, and arranged in the gallery, they become autonomous objects.
The quarried Soverign Stones are surrounded by a constellation of cement sculptures cast in pits that Caesar himself dug into the bedrock. These, too, reflect the particularities of the city’s geography, with every bump and groove on their surfaces reflecting a corresponding absence elsewhere.
The work in this exhibition was inspired by Coral Castle, a landmark of outsider architecture in South Dade that was built entirely of coral rock by a Lithuanian immigrant in the early 20th century. In Caesar’s view, Coral Castle is a radical form of architecture that recontextualizes “landscape” as “object” by constructing a space that is in equal parts a monument and a quarry. Expanding on this idea, the works in this exhibition represent an attempt to grasp the enormity of the strata beneath us through the excavation and preservation of a relatively tiny, artificially colored fragment of a greater geological whole.
Stone Underground is the result of an exchange between LAXART (Los Angeles) and Locust Projects. At each space, a locally based artist who has shown at one has been given the opportunity to develop a new body of work for exhibition at the other. Caesar's exhibition Rozoj was held at LAXART in 2013, while Precipe/Postmodem by Miami-based artist Jillian Mayer was shown at Locust Projects in the same year. An exhibition of new work by Mayer will open at LAXART in 2016.
