There is [another] response to chaos, which I have not read about, which is stillness.
TM
Walking, paradoxically, allows for the possibility of stillness.
LE
Place stilled by mottled formations and a scruple of compassion.
Poet’s House : Anne Carson on Stillness (audio), 2018.
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
Mottled formation, with a scruple of compassion, that stills and bends.
… you should settle quickly
The Principles of Concealment by David Wagoner
All your differences with whatever lies
Around you, forcing yourself to agree
With rocks and bushes, trees and wild grass,
Horses, cows, or sheep, even debris
To find out what you have in common.
Statement Preliminary to the Invention of Solace by Pattiann Rogers
A comfort understood like that
Must be present now and possible.
“How do songs, stories — the unique ones that are art, the no less special everyday ones locked up inside people’s heads or bantered back and forth with other folks — become narratives in which daydreams, words and sounds of actual lives/life are embedded. Maybe stories, fiction or not, give solace, context, possibility, as much with their stable recurring forms as with their infinitely various contents, and thereby produce examples of lives shaped, framed so they are recognizably distinguishable from emptiness, from darkness that seems always to surround and render lives unseeable.”
Arizona By John Edgar Wideman, November 18, 2019, New Yorker
[…] perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words
So you imagine other worlds, […] hatch plots of escape and dereliction–a. A gaining of land by the permanent recession of the water line. b. The land so gained.–(SH)
“Vini kouzen map mennen’w!”, in the title of the exhibition, translates as “Come on cousin, I’ll take you!”. The bit of dialogue parallels a moment toward the end of Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby, when Thérèse volunteers to take Son to Isle de Chevaliers. Though partly blind, Thérèse insists on leading the way to a place where she thinks Son needs to be in order to make a better choice about his life, future, and in service to blackness; she encourages him to run toward the ancient and enchanted. It is, in essence, the best way to navigate this formulation of the Caribbean, through kinship and with the help of those we share deep affinities.
