Caleb Nussear and Brian Zegeer www.shellgame.info

Opening Reception: Friday, March 4, 6:00 – 10:00 PM Closing Reception: Sunday, March 20, 6:00 – 10:00 PM

Local Project is pleased to present Shell Game, an exhibition by Caleb Nussear and Brian Zegeer, running from Friday, March 4 to Monday, March 21. Employing cast-off materials from Long Island City’s streets in the production of a sculptural installation, Shell Game enacts a conversation with LIC.’s idiosyncratic urban geography. Characterized in abrupt transitions between light-industrial, residential, and commercial zones, LIC’s mercurial character will be elicited in an ever-changing, visionary topology created from its own detritus. This installation will be accompanied by an animation documenting sculptural investigations.

The project will take place in two phases:

1.Throughout the two weeks of the exhibition, Zegeer will travel throughout the various LIC neighborhoods with a home-made pushcart, salvaging cast-off objects from the streets surrounding the gallery. A video camera mounted to the cart will document Zegeer’s travels.

2.The objects will then be transported to Local Project gallery, where Nussear will integrate the components into a room-sized steel, plywood, and cut-glass grid-work, suggesting Long Island City’s geography in miniature. Nussear will continually rearrange incoming objects into topologies over the course of the exhibition, privileging materiality and formal insights over a literal representation of the surrounding neighborhoods.

An LCD monitor at the entrance of the gallery will combine video footage from scavenging missions with a stop-motion animation produced from documentation of the evolving installation.

Shell Game ultimately creates a composite of its subject landscape, via the material investigations of the artists. In plumbing Long Island City’s neighborhoods for their rubbish and cast-aways, the artists offer a snapshot of the various social, economic, and cultural forces at play in the constitution of this dynamic neighborhood.

There will be an opening reception, 6:00 to 10:00pm, Friday, March 4th and a closing reception, 6:00 to 10:00pm, Sunday, March 20th. Gallery hours : Thursday – Monday, 12-6pm. 45-10 Davis Street, Long Island City, NY 11101

Caleb Nussear is an American artist living in New York. Trained academically in philosophy and critical theory, his work is based upon meeting points between the natural world and scientific systems of knowledge.

Brian Zegeer makes animations and mixed-media installations. He received an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania and attended Skowhegan School of Sculpture and Painting. He has recently exhibited at Louis V. ESP, Thompkins Projects, Work Gallery, Elga Wimmer Gallery, and Stephan Stoyanov Gallery in New York. Recent exhibitions abroad include 1st New York – Chongqing Video Festival (Organhaus Chongqing, China), and VizKult/Transient Exhibition in Bucharest, Romania. Zegeer writes art reviews for Timeout NY and lives in Long Island City.

Local Project is a non-profit organization committed to building a forum for artists, creating synergy between their art work and the public. LP supports all form of self-expression by providing an open space for artists without concern to their genre, medium, or provenance. In using diversity as the key to growth, both the artist and the community collaborate toward a richer and fuller development of both.