The extraterrestrial art of Nicholas Lobo

It’s refreshing to see artists who will go to great lengths to create their work, knowing full well they may never have a chance to sell it. Miami’s Nicolas Lobo is one such artist.

He’s currently working on a very unconventional piece entitled Future Raëlian Embassy Floor Tile Prototype for a December group show at the MOCA Goldman Warehouse. As part of his preparation to create the work, Lobo went so far as to join a fringe UFO religion known as the Raëlian Movement.

The show is titled “The Possibility of an Island,” which is also the title of a provocative novel by contemporary French author Michel Houellebecq, and features such internationally known artists as Cao Fei, Cory Arcangel, and Peter Coffin. The novel functions as the exhibition’s theme, and MOCA assistant curator Ruba Katrib, who put the show together, describes it as “a literary work that uses science-fiction tropes to talk about the human experience,” adding, “Science fiction can be seen as a barometer of the social moment. [The story is] more of a reflection of how we live today.”

Central to the book’s plot is a religious group called the Elohimites, who turn civilization on its head, replacing sexual reproduction and old age with cloning and suicide. The group is loosely based on the Raëlian Movement, which originated in Paris in 1974, founded by Claude Vorilhon (known by his followers as “Raël”), who claimed to have been visited the previous year by a race of beings known as the Elohim. During a series of meetings with the aliens, and a later visit to their planet, Vorilhon learned that they reproduce through cloning and that they created human life on Earth -- cloned in their image. Someday they would return to Earth and reveal mankind’s true origins. Vorilhon was charged with building them an “embassy” where they could land their spacecraft and hold forth.

Lobo’s interest in the Raëlians, who claim a membership of some 80,000 worldwide, stemmed from the fact the group was “always being harassed by the mainstream media, and that just annoyed me.” As someone whose work falls outside of Miami’s art mainstream, Lobo can probably relate. Since 2001, the 29-year-old has been creating some of the strangest conceptual artwork this city has seen.

“He’s not concerned with aesthetics. The final outcome of what he makes always refers to the idea,” says curator Katrib, adding that Lobo’s work is usually not particularly visual. Weird concoctions and crusty textures, along with equally obscure subject matter, characterize his pieces. In a 2006 solo show at Locust Projects, he created an accurately scaled physical representation of the electromagnetic field generated by the FPL substation right across the street from the exhibition space.

In his more recent Transformative Park, Lobo took a graffiti design that had defaced an outdoor sculpture (an art-in-public-places piece) and turned it into a three-dimensional object using materials such as cereal, Styrofoam, and split peas. “People support a certain kind of art production in this city, and his work doesn’t really fit into that,” Katrib observes. “But it fits internationally.”

“The thing that I want to get to is the authentic artifact,” says Lobo, “something that has some kind of authenticity to it.” He illustrates his notion of the “authentic” by pointing to portraits of prostitutes that decorated saloons and brothels in the Old West. As paintings they were usually not very good, but years later they might appear in an antique shop as an artifact of that era. Perhaps a bullet hole in the canvas from a gunfight might place the painting in an entirely new context. Then some Texas oil tycoon purchases the portrait and hangs it on his wall, adding yet another layer of meaning to what essentially was just a banal work.

“The thing that would be great,” Lobo continues, “would be to create an object that could travel through time and carry the traces of what it has traveled through.” It’s a kind of reverse engineering. Lobo first imagines all the ideas a piece might evoke, then works backward, constructing an object to encompass them.

His latest effort has him striving to create an authentic Raëlian artifact. What will be appearing in the show are three terrazzo tiles on plastic pallets. Each tile depicts a “crop circle” (those elaborate patterns that have mysteriously appeared in fields of wheat or corn) that Raëlians have considered as possible architectural designs for the Elohim “embassy” Vorilhon remains intent on constructing. Lobo hopes to offer these tiles to the Raëlians, with the idea that they’d be installed in embassy’s floor. He actually joined the group in order to give his objects greater authenticity.

“My intention was to contact and meet them, to be very open with them and see if I could create artwork in collaboration with them,” Lobo says of the project’s genesis. He did manage to contact local Raëlian representatives, and they asked him to come to their meetings, which he did. Eventually, says Lobo, “it just seemed natural to join.”

Art was always the motivating factor for Lobo, something he discussed openly with his Raëlian acquaintances. “Obviously the driving force was to create this piece,” he says, while also acknowledging a general curiosity and an agreement with some of the group’s core beliefs. “Everyone has their reasons for joining a religion,” he notes. His happens to be art. And does he believe that extraterrestrials visited Vorilhon in 1973? “It’s as plausible,” he allows, “as anything else in any other religion.”

On October 7, Lobo received his “transmission,” the Raëlian equivalent of a baptism, which involved a simple ceremony in which his DNA was offered telepathically to the Elohim.

As a Raëlian, Lobo says he doesn’t do much except go to monthly gatherings, which he describes as very informal get-togethers. He also predicts he may still be attending long after “The Possibility of an Island” has been taken down. “The process is very open-ended,” he notes. “As long as I feel it’s important, I will [continue as a member].”

Most of Lobo’s artworks have been destroyed immediately after their initial showing, but Future Raëlian Embassy Floor Tile Prototype could have some longevity. “I think I may be going into a phase where stuff tends to stick around,” he says simply.

It’s possible the Raëlian embassy will never be built, or that Lobo’s tiles may not be used. Lobo says he’s fine with that. Then again, they might, and perhaps 1000 years from the Raëlian Movement will end up like the Elohimites in Michel Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island -- an important religion and a dominant cultural force. And at the entrance to Raëlian Embassy, decorating the floor, you’ll find none other than Nicolas Lobo’s terrazzo tiles.

“The Possibility of an Island” opens December 4 at MOCA at Goldman Warehouse, 404 NW 26th St., Miami. For hours and more information call 305-893-6211 or visit www.mocanomi.org