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Miami artist Manny Prieres painted some
creepy characters into this wall mural. |
During Art Basel week, don’t miss the launch of the new
book, Miami Contemporary Artists, featuring a diverse
survey of more than 100 artists who have contributed to the
grassroots evolution of Miami’s art scene. Produced by Art
Center/South Florida artist-in-residence Julie Davidow and noted
architectural photographer Paul Clemence, the book reveals
scene-building as the product of overflowing creative capital
and thirst for a multilevel art experience, as it coincides with
municipal regeneration and global art trends.
In conjunction
with the book, local artist and critic Gean Moreno is curating a
dual venue exhibition at Art Center/South Florida in Miami Beach
and the Freedom Tower in downtown Miami through Jan. 6. Under
Moreno’s curatorial eye, the outcome will certainly be probing
and unorthodox.
Miami
Contemporary Artists: Creating a Scene
features a powerhouse of local artists and alternative venues,
including Hernan Bas, Robert Chambers, Susan Lee Chun, Naomi
Fisher, Luis Gispert, Adler Guerrier, Alex Heria, Manny Prieres,
Ralph Provisero, Tom Scicluna, Onajide Shabaka and Michelle
Weinberg. According to Moreno, the book is a space of
presentation, but the exhibition functions as a space of
production in an attempt to reprocess the creative organism and
present Miami art in a nonstandard way.
Much of the
production is deliberately self-negating. “The book tells one
story and I tell another,”
Moreno
said. The exhibition isn’t anti-scene, but anti-image. Some
works, such as George Sanchez-Calderon’s functional bar and
Ernesto Oroza’s bench in the video viewing space, run the risk
of going unnoticed and blurring the lines between art and n’art
(not art).
In a similar
vein, the exhibition features a live pirate radio station run by
Talking Head Transmitters and random music-making interspersed
with distortion noise generated by Carlos Ascurra and Juan
Gonzales. Westen Charles and Ivan Doth Depeña invite another
element of social interaction into the exhibition space with an
interactive poker tournament installation. Another ambiguous
setting contains an arrangement of Kevin Arrow’s unfinished
projects and collected antiques, including Drug Enforcement
Administration recordings and countless slides.
Other
noteworthy pieces include Glexis Novoa’s microsized,
sociohistoric wall drawing of the
Freedom
Tower,
Frances Trombly’s hand-woven canvases hanging on Gavin Perry’s
lace wallpaper and Eugenio Espinosa’s raw canvas with black
gridlines, a revisitation of work he started in the ’70s.
The Box and Bas
Fisher alternative venues were offered presentation space
outside the curatorial structure. Twenty Twenty Projects and the
House collaborated to produce Rats, a group show that
includes art decimated by vermin, paintings purchased at thrift
stores, a fog machine installed into a puce-colored column and a
rattling electrical box. Don’t miss a beautiful piece by Daniel
Arsham — gnawed by studio-dwelling rabbits.
According to
Moreno, part of the work featured in Miami Contemporary
Artists: Creating a Scene functions “in the ether … an
in-between zone.” For instance, the TM Sisters produced a ’zine
for the exhibition, work that exists outside the presentation
space and independently forges an organic path of dispersal.
Maria Martinez-Caña explores similar preoccupations with
photographs of exhibition spaces in which the art has been
blanked out. Likewise, Betty Monteavaro built upon layers of
erasure to create a chalk drawing of a 1959 film poster of
The Mummy. Traces of process — including water droplets and
chalk dust — are visibly preserved in the final image.
Miami
Contemporary Artists
reveals Miami’s unique voice within the global art community. A
brilliant collection of people collaborated to produce
Creating a Scene and surrounding events. The book will be
featured during Art Basel’s Art Salon series with accompanying
book-signings and discussion panels scheduled throughout the
week.
Miami
Contemporary Artists will be showing through Jan. 6 at both
the Art Center/South
Florida
Gallery,
800 Lincoln
Road in
Miami Beach, and the Freedom
Tower,
600 Biscayne Blvd. in Miami. For more information, call
305-674-8278. |
