School's Out

Locust rings the bell with adolescent despair and lollipop dreams

Comments (0) By Carlos Suarez De Jesus Thursday, Apr 6 2006

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Giordano, one of the more interesting painters in town, contributes a handful of small mixed-media-on-paper works, including Disappearing Dreams of Yesterday, a regular sheet of paper thickly caked with silver glitter.

The TM Sisters, whose work here is varnished in a DIY aesthetic, weigh in with Everything looks perfect from far away, a pillow-size piece combining sewing, watercolor, and collage. In it a group of boys roughhouse while high school girls sporting gym shorts swoon nearby. Trickles of glitter and blue thunderbolts, outlined in black thread stitching, fill the sky.

Stephanie Vella (foreground) plays Janie with deadpan bravado

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Through April 22. Locust Projects, 105 NW 23rd St, Miami

105 NW 23rd St, Miami; 305-576-8570

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Fashioned from black and pink tape, Danilowicz's Califlorida, by far the largest work in the show, covers an entire wall. The unusual mural is geometric in nature and has the feel of a Nautilus seashell sawn in half.

A work by Friends with You's Sam Borkson, titled Dr., depicts what appears to be a cowpoke straight out of the Wild West. The four-armed, four-legged character bears a twisted resemblance to Doc Holliday or Wyatt Earp and seems hell-bent on raising a ruckus at high noon.

In another playful piece, Arturo Sandoval III, the other half of Friends with You, offers a harmless vision of the supernatural with Blue Angel of Death. A cross between Casper the Friendly Ghost and Greek mythology's hundred-eyed monster, the apparition could be easily drafted as this exhibit's official mascot. Conjuring the show's spirit, it beckons us away from the compost heap of reality with which we are confronted in the main gallery, and into a cotton-candy garden where everything stinks like a rose.