Category: art

Adopted Landscapes

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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

Steve McQueen, Sunshine State

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Sunshine State, exhibition (31 March – 31 July 2022) at Pirelli HangarBicocca, is organized in collaboration with Tate Modern, London, where the artist had presented a first version, titled ?Steve McQueen”, in 2020.

The title of the exhibition evokes the artist’s new work, Sunshine State (2022), commissioned and produced by the International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) 2022.

Catalogue extract, the essay In the Dead of the Light: Steve McQueen’s Sunshine State by Cora Gilroy-Ware.

Fig. 1
Photographer unknown, African American man picking oranges at a contest in a grove, 1952, black and
white photoprint, State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory.

[…] how do we know this man is American? With no name or record of his identity, he could be one of the thousands of men brought to Florida from the West Indies during this same era to carry out temporary
agricultural labour, most cutting sugar cane, some working in orange groves.

Related : Also, from State Archives of Florida, Florida Memory; same caption.

Kay Andrews picking oranges at contest in a grove - Orlando
Kay Andrews picking oranges at contest in a grove – Orlando. February, 1952

The Farmers Brawl

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Farmers' Brawl

Creator: Brueghel, Pieter, ca. 1525-1569

Title: The Farmers Brawl Date: ca. 1552-1569

Date Destroyed or Lost: 1945

Nationality: Flemish

Medium: Oil on canvas Object

Dimensions: 71 x 100 cm

Former Repository: Gemäldegalerie (Dresden, Germany)Former Inventory Number: Inv Nr. 819 Circumstances of Destruction or Loss: Destroyed February 13-14 during three allied bombing raids on Dresden or in subsequent fires.

Notes: For additional information see: Bernhard, Marianne, and Klaus P. Rogner. 1965. Verlorene Werke der Malerei; in Deutschland in der Zeit von 1939 bis 1945 zerstörte und verschollene Gemalde aus Museen und Galerien. Munchen: F.A. Ackermann, p.96.

Source: Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute Library Photo Archive, 225 South Street, Williamstown MA, 01267

Posted in art

The Measure of Man

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Natalia Garcia-Lee‘s exhibition (April 22, 2022 – June 25, 2022), The Measure of Man,  featured twelve grand oil on canvas renderings, a series of intimate oil gems, and a mixed-media installation titled The War Machine to interpret the tactical ‘complexities’ burrowed within the human psyche. Inspired by the findings of American psychologist Edward C. Tolman, and behavioral research of ethologist John B. Calhoun, the exploration of mammalian behavior and the cognitive reactions to both physical and societal structures provide the foundation on which the paintings emerge. The output of both Tolman and Calhoun serve as landing points in Garcia-Lee’s interpretation of the paradoxical nature of the human experience, assumed on the basis that living creatures are inherently alike.

The collection of paintings, drawings and collages are the artist’s first solo exhibition at LnS Gallery. In tandem with the show, a comprehensive exhibition catalogue will feature informative essays by Dr. Carol Damian, emeritus Professor of Art History at Florida International University, and former Director and Chief Curator of the Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum at Florida International University (Miami, Florida) and Melissa Diaz, Cultural Arts Curator at Deering Estate (Miami, Florida).

The First Death, 2021
oil on canvas
60 x 72 inches
Low Level Learning, 2021
oil on canvas
72 x 96 inches

On Dave Hickey

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This passage epitomizes Hickey’s unusual relationship to literature and his uncanny ability to draw forward an aspect of a poem or novel to explicate an artwork without reducing either to mere illustration. Instead he sets off a chain reaction of implications at the level of feeling. While he does not shy away from Gober’s homosexuality, in evoking Great Expectations Hickey conjures a painful outsiderness, the plane where the artist and writer meet, all the while resisting any speculation on individual biography. It’s an extraordinarily sophisticated maneuver, one that doesn’t ascribe intention based on personal information but rather allows the art to express its deeper content.

A Proliferation of Beauties, Jarrett Earnest.

From nybooks on Hickey (1938 – 2021; artnet obituary), Far From Respectable: Dave Hickey and His Art by Daniel Oppenheimer, 2021; The Invisible Dragon: Essays on Beauty, Revised and Expanded, 2009; Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy by Dave Hickey, 1997.

… a finer point on his argument for “beauty,” “not what it is but what it does—its rhetorical function in our discourse with images,” leveling a critique against what we would now call the rise of the “professional managerial class” of art-world gatekeepers—the curators, critics, and academics who have disenfranchised audiences from the validity of their own experiences, judgments, and tastes. Hickey was not interested in “beauty” as an aesthetic or philosophical category, but rather in a “proliferation of beauties,” around which communities of desire congregate.

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Air Guitar embodies an attitude toward being alive in the world, one that abolishes distinctions between “high” and “low” cultures and aligns objects based on the quality of the response they elicit. 

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Moving beyond the personal psychology or biography of an artist, the artwork extends an unlikely communion with other alienated people who have found that by making and thinking about something beautiful, they invoke a gentler, more exciting, and more livable society.