Category: exhibition

Bernadette Despujols

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Adler Guerrier (2021), Oil on canvas, 40 x 30 in. 

Spinello Projects presents I Love You, Man, the debut solo gallery exhibition by Venezuelan-born artist Bernadette Despujols. The exhibition features a suite of oil paintings depicting men who are close to the artist, on view at the Gesamtkunstwerk Building located at 2930 NW 7th Avenue. A special locals-only preview reception will take place Saturday, November 20, 6-10pm. Miami Art Week vernissage will take place Tuesday, November 30, 11am-4pm. Exhibition through January 15, 2022. Free and open to the public. 

In I Love You, Man Bernadette Despujols paints the closest men in her circle. The paintings are a departure from her usual depictions of women in paintings. In previous paintings, Despujols positioned herself as the subject of her paintings although they were portraits of anonymous unconscious women sourced from pornography made by men. Holding the belief that to be a woman makes other people uncomfortable and ultimately poses a threat to men she turns her gaze and paints the cishet men in her life: friends, lovers, family. Despujols uses the portraiture of her male subjects to experience her relationships with deeper intimacy. Objectification and intersubjectivity (the relation or intersection between people’s cognitive perspectives) ebbs and flows between the painter and the painted. She objectifies the men in the paintings at times, focusing solely on one body part or their bare skin and bodies, but the men pose for the pictures with awareness and dignity. Nothing is stolen from them; Despujols may want to position these men ironically as muses but the truth is she defeats the irony of it with pure affinity and care towards the people she paints, leaving the men to decide what they want to wear and show of themselves. In the act of portraiture she experiences the vulnerability of these men through their quiet shyness or awkwardness with themselves, ways that would otherwise challenge the presumed status quo of manhood: tough, aggressive, aloof, qualities of patriarchy that, to Despujols, imprison both men and women in a cycle of violence. The paintings are formally infused with skewed perspectives, foreground and background foibles, and blank, paintless spaces furthering the playfulness she captures by being around the men she loves.


Available works click here

Viewpoints at Bakehouse Art Complex

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Viewpoints: Expressions of an artist community

November 13, 2021 through March 27, 2022.

In celebration of its 35th anniversary season, Bakehouse presents Viewpoints: Expressions of an artist community, a group exhibition co-curated by visual artist Edouard Duval-Carrié and Bakehouse Curatorial + Public Programs Manager, Laura Novoa. The exhibition showcases twenty-five Bakehouse artists working predominantly in two-dimensional media, including painting, drawing, print-making, and photography. Duval-Carrié and Novoa draw on recent work to examine the creative output of a community and the way its constituent artists have navigated the changes and challenges of the last year and a half.

Recognizing the organization’s long tradition of group exhibitions and considering its current and future role as a local hub for art and art-making, Viewpoints hints at the array of individual styles and affinities coexisting in a shared space and how this diversity has come to define the spirit of the artists working, producing, and communing within Bakehouse.

Participating artists include Jason Aponte, Maria Theresa Barbist, Thomas Bils, Lujan Candria, Alain Castoriano, Rose Marie Cromwell, Gabriela Gamboa, GeoVanna Gonzalez, Adler Guerrier, Gonzalo Hernandez, Monique Lazard, Rhea Leonard, Amanda Linares, Philip Lique, Nicole Maynard-Sahar, Patricia Monclus, Najja Moon, Mateo Nava, William Osorio, Christina Pettersson, Jennifer Printz, Sandra Ramos, Nicole Salcedo, Tonya Vegas, and Almaz Wilson.

Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic

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This major exhibition, 29 January – 25 April 2010 at Tate Liverpool, (also traveled to Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela, España, July – October 2010) inspired by Paul Gilroy’s seminal book The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993), identifies a hybrid culture that spans the Atlantic, connecting Africa, North and South America, The Caribbean and Europe. The exhibition is the first to trace in depth the impact of Black Atlantic culture on Modernism and will reveal how black artists and intellectuals have played a central role in the formation of Modernism from the early twentieth century to today.

I made a post before. But I have recently found the dvd of installation images, dating April 2010.

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Images, courtesy of Tate Liverpool.

Natural Transcendence at Oolite Arts

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‘Natural Transcendence’ curated by Rhonda Mitrani, which opens at Oolite Arts-928 gallery space, starting June 16. The group exhibition features video and photography work that reflects an ethereal sensibility toward nature. Exploring the intersection between humanity and nature even prior to the pandemic, not just in vast terrains, but in domesticated landscapes.

The exhibition features works by Adler Guerrier, Megan McLarney, Colleen Plumb, Anastasia Samoylova, Jennifer Steinkamp, Wendy Wischer and Antonia Wright.

Laura Novoa’s text on HOW TO: Oh, Look at me

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HOW TO: Oh, look at me is a film that captures the multi-layered, interdisciplinary performance conceived by GeoVanna Gonzalez as an activation of her sculptural installation of the same name on view at Locust Projects through May 22. Through the performance, which features an original musical score by Batry Powr and involves two dancers, Cheina Ramos and Alondra Balbuena, and poets, Zaina Alsous and Arsimmer McCoy, the installation is transformed from a static form to a space that encourages contemplation, meditation and connection. 

Locust Project’s blog

The film, as a receptacle of different languages — spoken, gestural, musical — that come together in their singular agency to create a communal whole, functions as an added layer of meaning, a translation of a translation. Through the performance, Gonzalez examines how forms of communication and miscommunication, both in person and mediated, reflect our self-awareness and condition our perception of those around us.

Space out: Time is Art

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Art Factory Project announced their inaugural exhibition, Space out: Time is Art curated by Adriana Herrera.

February 25 – April 30, 2021.

Spaced Out: Time is Art gathers a set of paintings, photographs, collages, sculptures, and other tridimensional works created during the pandemic by twenty artists residing in Miami and four guests from different cities of the continent of America: Buenos Aires, Santiago de Chile, Salvador, and New York. The dialog between multiple visions that configure different exit doors, further stresses the point that it is not only possible but also necessary to counter the freedom of artistic imagination to the current oppressive atmosphere. 

The inquiry into the practices developed during 2020, the year in which the world was unexpectedly transformed, and we crossed, as never before, the threshold of post-truth, has led me to witness the “zeitgeist” or the spirit of the times: a good part of the collected works reiterates creative models and cultural visions that specifically respond to this period. Artistic creation is itself a way of giving time to the tasks of the imagination and, for those who live and work in isolated studios, the restrictions of the pandemic did not radically alter their routines but rather reaffirmed their dedication to creation. But it is no less true that numerous works emerge or were reoriented towards modes of reflection and transformative response to the challenges of the present. There is, for instance, a reiterated coincidence in the perceived fragility of the definitions of urban space, as much as a reaffirmation of our own subjective and sensitive presence through means of gestures; and without a doubt, a renewed awareness of the urgency of directing our gaze —and our steps— towards those animal and plant kingdoms being displaced by our voraciousness and our speed. 
 

Adriana Herrera, Curator.