Jackson Pollock, Jean Tinguely, Marcel Duchamp and Bruce Nauman would all be proud. In some significant way, each of these pioneering individuals have broken the boundaries for what art should look like, how it can and should be produced, who may see it, and how long it is meant to exist. As a kind of love letter to these innovators, Miami-based artists Justin H. Long and Robert 'Meatball' Lorie (known collectively as Funner Projects) staged a single engagement at Locust Projects on Friday, August 16th.
During this one-night-stand, entitled ImpactArte, Funner Projects placed eight, unique art 'contraptions' throughout the space. Each was its own quirky tribute to past masterpieces drawing from the realms of Conceptual, Kinetic, Video and Performance art. For a project staged last November at the de la Cruz Collection, Funner Projects' Maintain Right (2012) was an absurdist, ambitious attempt to take action art to the next level. Armed with an enormous, mechanical crossbow, both Lorie and Long launched 2x4 stakes of plywood into large, modernist canvases. Effectively, they had created and destroyed artwork in a split-second. ImpactArte was a similar feat, where multiple objects were simultaneous actions and reactions to readymades. Emmy Award-winning director Andrew Hevia and yahoo.com Latin America lent their support and guidance to ImpactArte by recording the 8 works at a cinematic 3,000 frames-per-second.
Locust Projects has been consistently committed to experimental, avant-garde artists and projects. But perhaps they have yet to host a duo quite so eccentric and perceptive to the varying currents of contemporary art and its offshoots.
Funner Projects is a Miami-based collaboration between Justin H. Long and Robert 'Meatball' Lorie. Long earned his MFA from CalArts in 2008, Lorie earned his BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 2007. Funner Projects has presented work at the de la Cruz Collection Project Room (Miami), White Box (New York) and recently shared an Emmy Award with director Andrew Hevia.
