Luis Gispert
Garden of the Fugitives

September 10 - October 8, 2022

“First the good news. The moratorium on imagining the end of capitalism, noted in the 1990s by Fredric Jameson, has finally expired. The long-awaited end of capitalism could merely be the beginning of something much worse. Late capitalism is certainly bad enough, with its explosive cocktail of climate change, inequality, police brutality and the deadly pandemic. Today, it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the continuation of capitalism as we know it.

The not-so-good news is that, in undertaking this speculative exercise in apocalyptic scenario-planning, the left has a hard time differentiating itself from the right. In fact, the two ideological poles have all but converged on a shared description of the new reality.

 For many in both camps, the end of actually existing capitalism no longer means the advent of a better day, Instead, the emerging consensus is that the new regime is nothing short of feudalism—an -ism with very few respectable friends. True, today’s neo-feudalism arrives with catchy slogans, slick mobile apps, even the promise of eternal virtual happiness in the borderless demesne of Zuckerberg’s metaverse. Its vassals have swapped their medieval garb for the elegant t-shirts from Brunello Cucinelli and sneakers from Golden Goose."

 Evgeny Morozov 

New Left Review 133/134 Jan/Apr 2022 

Imagine a boundless shopping cart on the other side of despair. Passionate clicking fills it with the judgments, decisions, desires, and fears that keep us estranged from the now. This news series of work builds off the unconscious minds of characters from a film the artist is currently making. 

The film follows Tomás - an immigrant laborer who fled his country by shipping himself in a crate years before the film's start. Now we find Tomás performing odd jobs for an upper-middle-class Latinx family while sending money to the estranged family he left behind.

A series of events forces Tomás to visit people in his community in search of something lost. However, this journey reflects Tomás's own social and emotional turmoil: even though he successfully immigrated to this country, he has psychologically never left his crate.

The paintings, a sculpture, and a video fill out the spaces between the characters' dread and desires. Who are these people living in a neo-feudalist fantasy? What do they dream or ponder beyond what we see on the screen?



Luis Gispert (b. 1972, Jersey City, NJ) studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and received his MFA from Yale University in 2001. Gispert is a multi-disciplinary artist addressing various topics in his work, such as the infiltration of subcultures in mainstream society. Over the years, concepts surrounding American culture and the fetishization of value have inspired the artist. Those interests continue to serve as the basis for all his ideas to evolve. Gispert's work acts as a composite, melding what is familiar with the unexpected. 

He has exhibited widely, including solo shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami; Art Pace, San Antonio, TX; University Art Gallery, University of California, San Diego, CA; Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH; and the Berkeley Museum of Art, UC Berkeley, CA; among others.

His work has also been included in exhibitions at National Museum of Poznan, Poland; MoMA PS1, New York; Shanghai MoCA, Shanghai; Royal Academy of Art, London; Fogg Art Museum, Harvard, Cambridge; Sculpture Center, New York; Contemporary Arts Center, Houston; Studio Museum, Harlem, New York; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge; and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York. 

Gispert's work is in permanent collections at Fogg Art Museum, Harvard; New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.