To Moore, his work on the New Work Miami exhibition is a way to keep the show rooted in Miami. ”We haven’t really figured it all out yet, but this will be a way to establish situations and context between the artists in the New Work show, as well as work with the abstracted vernacular of Miami, such as glass brick, plants and Miami baroque-mansions architecture.”

Locust Projects

In the Design District, Locust Projects has the first Miami solo exhibition by New York-based Adam Putnam, a veteran of the 2008 Whitney Biennial. Putnam is interested in the thresholds between inside and outside spaces, and the main gallery of Locust has been darkened — with the installation featuring photos, film projections and fragments of objects.

From plywood and cardboard, Putnam has built pillars and other architectural elements, a cross between gothic vaults, Romanesque abbeys and crypts. It’s meant to explore memory and perspective. Video cameras tape viewers, with the resulting footage played back on spooky surfaces: Viewers can see themselves in a real-time film, looking either confused or intrigued.

In the smaller Project Room, Locust and the curatorial group Site95 are presenting the first installment of the roving City Limits exhibition. Washington-based artist John James Anderson, who has shown at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, leads off with Maintenance Required. For the piece, Anderson charted broken D.C. fire hydrants on maps, motivated by the hydrant failures that occurred in the 2007 Eastern Market fires. The Project Room installation has sculptures of fire hydrants. Images of hydrants are also featured on more than 30 bus shelters around Miami, part of Locust Projects’ Out of the Box public art initiative.

In the performance piece JOB Creation Process, Anderson hands out flyers around D.C., with each containing historical insights into the role of money and commerce. For his Hours of Labor installation, Anderson hired day laborers to help him create objects, forging some interesting cultural exchanges with the laborers.

To hire day laborers, Anderson would show up at the local Home Depot, where he would encounter a wide range of Central and South Americans looking for work. The wall text for Hours of Labor whimsically declares that “Bolivians don’t play golf,” and the rage for golf among tourists and the upper classes has not made some native Bolivians happy. One Bolivian outside Home Depot, identified only as Mauricio, was particularly emphatic to Anderson: “Mauricio tells me that capitalist enterprise has turned Bolivia into nothing but golf courses.”