Listening closely

Tina Campt on episode 8 of ICA Miami’s podcast; begins at 22:54. Listening as an act of attunement. Listening for quiet (not an absence/subtle presence) affective registers within an image, a work, an installation, a practice.

“Attend to that which is not always directly confronting us”


T. Eliott Mansa project, Room for the living/ Room for the dead, at Locust Projects, would reward close listening.

Photography by Zachary Balber.

The installation merges the concept of Florida / Family rooms as a home’s casual, social hub for gathering, entertainment and play, with that of less-used living rooms that served as shrines for treasured family photos and heirlooms. Inspired/influenced by the artist’s friend and writer Noelle Barnes’ living room and the artist’s own memories of sunken living rooms of the 1970s, the artist considers the cultural phenomena of the living room as unlived, unoccupied, untouched spaces that children and guests were prohibited from using.

As an alternative, many people used ‘Florida/Family rooms’ to entertain company and watch television. Meanwhile, in the ‘unlived’ living rooms, many elders wrapped the furniture in protective plastic. For Mansa, these living rooms were treated as shrines–a space honoring one’s ancestors and those who have traveled beyond this plane. With this installation, the artist seeks to collapse the dichotomy between the ‘Living Room’ as shrine, and the ‘Florida/Family room’ in a way that creates ‘a room for the living’ as much as ‘a room for the dead’.


Chris Friday’s Good Times, curated by Laura Novoa, promises to engage quietly expressed modalities within the bold depicted.

[The works] prompt the viewer to consider more expansive notions of blackness and where communities – known and unknown – are given a space to dialogue, reflect, and celebrate.

Friday’s subjects – family, friends, colleagues – and the settings in which they exist, become mechanisms to unsettle traditional hierarchies and arrangements of power. In particular, she presents large-scale drawings of figures in acts of leisure – playing, dancing, resting – that refuse full exposure in a slight but noticeable turning away from the viewer. By placing them in the public realm (i.e. the gallery space), but limiting access to their interiority, Friday’s works inhabit a liminal space that is at once visible and hidden, silent and defiant.

The Floral Impulse

The Floral Impulse curated by Xaviera Simmons, November 29, 2022 – January 28, 2023.

David Castillo presents The Floral Impulse, an exhibition of works by over 25 artists organized by Xaviera Simmons in curatorial collaboration with David Castillo. Simmons included artists who naturally intersect with her own practice in concept and/or aesthetics. In painting, sculpture, photography, assemblage, and video, the exhibition contemplates the long history of the floral still life genre and the mythologies, symbolisms, and historical references encoded within pictorial representations of flowers.

The exhibition features work by Michael Adno, Rachael Anderson, Johannes Bosschaert, Se Jong Cho, Petra Cortright, Alejandro Garcia Contreras, Amber Cowan, Maria de los Angeles Rodriguez Jimenez, Timo Fahler, Naomi Fisher, Adler Guerrier, Daniel Gibson, Lyle Ashton Harris, Matthew Day Jackson, Austin Lee, Kalup Linzy, Grant Levy Lucero, Pepe Mar, Jillian Mayer, Nabeeha Mohamed, Cruz Ortiz, Rachel Rose, Devan Shimoyama, Xaviera Simmons, Shinique Smith, Nadir Souirgi, Su Su, and Yesiyu Zhao.

From humanity’s earliest recorded histories, the flower has served an intimate, sensual, and visceral role as a subject of allegorical meaning. Florals have long ornamented and bloomed across fundamental aspects of life as expressions of mourning, growth, remembrance, love, beauty, ritual, and resistance. In the inverse, flowers have at times been coded as shallow tokens of adornment or decay. Their uses and representations span time, place, and culture, in many ways forming a familiar and unifying grammar that connects human experience across its myriad conditions.

The floral measures time and marks history. The fleeting nature of life and its simple pleasures emerged among the moralizing themes imbued into flowers—as subject and symbol—during the late Renaissance, when the still life genre flourished in Northern Europe. Artists of the period depicted flowers in all their states, from bud to bloom to their inevitable wilting. These memento mori and vanitas paintings emphasized life’s transience, fragility, and frivolity in the grander scheme, reminding the viewer of their own impending mortality: They, like the flower, will one day wilt. Two centuries later in the Victorian era, interest soared in floriography, the symbolic language of flowers, allowing friends and lovers to communicate, through coded floral arrangements, the desires their society would not allow them to voice aloud. The Impressionists later took to flowers en plein air, capturing the beauty, immediacy, and ever-changing conditions of the natural world. And from Modernism to the contemporary, florals have been portrayed and iconized across a multitude of styles and movements that reinterpret their shapes, forms, colors, and significations.

The Floral Impulse identifies the flower across these diverse and distinct dimensions. Finding their contours across the practices of 28 artists, the florals represented in this exhibition pulse with the potentials of their iconographic predecessors.

Across three photographs, Michael Adno documents native and invasive flora found across the state of Florida.

Rachael Anderson recalls the history of the still life genre in which flowers depicted drooping and decaying mirror the fragile and temporal nature of life.

Johannes Bosschaert, the Northern Renaissance painter, came from a family of storied artists whose floral still lifes carried symbolic and religious meaning.

Se Jong Cho’s paintings depict close-ups of floral dissections that give an open view into the anatomy of a flower.

Petra Cortright reinterprets the floral still life into the contemporary language of digitality.

Amber Cowan depicts a fantastical and loaded floral scene across an intricately detailed glass assemblage.

Timo Fahler’s works play out scenes embedded with personal memory of family and life in the Southwest where he grew up; flowers in his work evoke the memory of his grandmother, who loved to garden.

Naomi Fisher’s work portrays a bird with its eggs nestled among blooming plants; these symbols each represent aspects of nature that cycle through seasons of birth.

Alejandro Garcia Contreras inverts the relationship between vase and flower in his ceramic sculpture; it bears flowers on its surface rather than within.

Daniel Gibson paints vivid, quasi-autobiographical scenes where flowers and other symbols of resilience, freedom, and celebration speak to his experiences of migrating to America from Mexico at a young age.

Adler Guerrier approaches his practice as a flâneur and cultural cartographer, exploring the flora dotting the urban environment as a motif towards adapted visions of Utopia.

Lyle Ashton Harris builds networks of memory in collages where personal photographs taken by the artist are pinned to a wall alongside ones—among them flowers, artworks, and portraits—taken from books, newspapers, and other media.

Matthew Day Jackson works in direct conversation with Northern Renaissance painters in works where he recreates their floral still lifes in mixed media.

Combining digital tools and traditional techniques, Austin Lee’s paintings convey the affective dimensions of the flower.

Grant Levy Lucero’s ceramic diptych interprets the flower across two treatments: In an amphora with surface overgrown with lilies, and in a second vessel painted with the branding of Miracle-Gro Plant Food.

Kalup Linzy unravels the family tree from which his pantheon of drag personalities originate, depicting them in a landscape as flowers.

In his highly layered visual language, Pepe Mar incorporates a floral print by the 16th century Italian botanist Giovanni Baptista Ferrari into an assemblage work where found objects link past with present.

Jillian Mayer’s sculptures embed floral drawings within multi-colored panes of glass, drawing connections with the legacy of stained glass.

Nabeeha Mohamed’s florid painting challenges questions of class privilege by depicting a beautiful object in crude detail and brash colors.

In a highly stylized work where skulls and roses surround a central figure in a cowboy hat, Cruz Ortiz’s painting redefines themes of memento mori and vanitas paintings in the context of South Texas and the histories and politics that inform life on the Texas-Mexico border.

Maria de los Angeles Rodriguez Jimenez renders a swirling vortex of eyes and hair that together echo an image of a pistil and petals.

Rachel Rose’s work depicts clipped scenes of collage in which the flora assembled is made from found and scavenged photographs taken from children’s books.

Devan Shimoyama’s sculpture, a memento mori, depicts a swing adorned with flowers hanging from a heavy chain.

Across subtle and sparse compositions, Xaviera Simmons’ elegant photographs of floral bouquets are loaded with associations to artists across centuries who have used the floral as metaphor.

Shinique Smith’s collages incorporate vintage fabrics, embroidered appliques, and swirling strokes of black ink that together form bouquets of association to personal memories and art historical references.

A surreal scene unfolds in Nadir Souirgi’s piece, a painting of Post-Impressionist Paul Gauguin experiencing a hallucination where he sees himself in a haunting, blooming landscape.

In a process whereby the artist paints with the canvas hanging overhead, Su Su’s still life of a vase, flower, and hundred-dollar bill—recalling vanitas painting—drips outward, reaching towards the viewer.

On a canvas that evokes the shape of flower petals, Yesiyu Zhao’s painting depicts a person fiercely wielding a weapon.

Johannes Bosschaert, Bouquet of Tulips, Lilies and Carnations in a glass vase, with apples, grapes, a lizard and a butterfly, in a stone niche. Oil on canvas. ca. 1625. 42½ x 34 inches

Adopted Landscapes

Adopted Landscapes, an exhibition co-curated by Dina Mitrani with Marina Font–gallery artist and resident of Collective 62. This exhibition features the work of twenty-two artists pushing beyond the boundaries of the photographed landscape and will be on view through November 15, 2022.

In the history of art, the landscape has been one of the most explored subjects of representation. Adopted Landscapes brings together contemporary works of photography-based art that depict the landscape as a departure point for unique conceptual and narrative works. Disinterested in the photographic landscape as a conclusion, these works offer answers to the question: How does the traditional photographic landscape serve multidisciplinary artists today

Combining mediums as well as interlacing techniques, the artists build upon the formal qualities of the genre. In some cases, the landscape is transformed before the camera captures the image. In others, the image undergoes digital manipulation; while in many of the works, the printed image is the base layer where multimedia elements are manually applied to the surface.  Each artist offers a different vantage point, but their intentions are similar: to transmute the pure retinal experience of capturing nature and re-interpreting it in a way that is connected with the human experience.

These works inspire us to contemplate the ever-changing, ancient relationship between person and place.  They suggest a range of themes including climate change, erasure, nostalgia, and in some cases, a sense of displacement. Through innovative experimentation, each artist inspires different ways of seeing, making us more aware of our roles and responsibilities in this dynamic world we all share.

The Collective 62 Art Studios, founded by Nina Surel, is an independent art space devoted to creation outside of the traditional circuits of art.  Located in Liberty City, Collective 62 also seeks to reverse the growing phenomenon of gentrification through regeneration that derives from creation and community-based workshops.  

Adler Guerrier, Adriene Hughes, Aline Smithson, Amy Gelb, Charlotta Hauksdottir, Christa Blackwood, Colleen Plumb, Deryn Cowdy, Gabriela Gamboa, Ingrid Weyland, Luciana Abait, Lujan Candria, Marina Font, Marina Gonella, Manuel Nores, Phil Toledano, Roberto Huarcaya, Silvia Lizama, Tatiana Parcero, Thomas Jackson, Vanessa Marsh, and Veronica Pasman.

September 15 – November 15, 2022

Collective 62, 901 NW 62nd Street, Miami, FL 33150