Tag: art

Everyday Travails

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The press release


everyday travails

Adler Guerrier
Everyday Travails
David Castillo Gallery
2234 NW 2nd Avenue, Miami
October 10- November 7, 2009
Reception October 10, 7-10 pm

David Castillo Gallery is proud to present Everyday Travails, Adler Guerrier’s first solo exhibition at the gallery and his first in Miami in over four years. The artist’s creative impulse is both intellectual and organic and is shown by his love of paper and its natural evolution into artwork and by his contemplative photography of the everyday. The current exhibition includes drawings, sculpture, photography, and video encapsulating the ideas of constant interest to the artist: place and the everyday.

The works reveal a structured imprint of the everyday, in the exploration of the relationship of media to the psycho-geographical, social, and political nature of place. Adler Guerrier sets drawing, collage, sculpture, photo, video, and installation in dialogue. His inspired cultural hybrid between color and plane are anchored by fearless, site-specific subversions of place and time in regards to conceptions of race, class, and culture. Often calling upon the districts of Miami and his own backyard, Guerrier examines the contemporary flaneur in an impending post-demographic age.

Adler Guerrier was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti and lives and works in Miami. He studied at the New World School of the Arts in Miami and has exhibited widely including The Whitney Biennial 2008, the Wolfsonian Miami Beach, and Miami Art Museum. The artist has recently exhibited in VideoStudio at The Studio Museum in Harlem and Pivot Points 3 at Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami and is in the permanent collection of both institutions. Upcoming exhibitions and projects include Afro-Modernism: Journeys through the Black Atlantic at the Tate Liverpool; commissioned works for Locust Projects Miami and a monograph to be published by Name Publications. Guerrier’s work has appeared in the New York Times, Artnews, and Art in America, among numerous other publications.

About David Castillo Gallery

Gallery Hours
Tuesday – Saturday, 10 am – 5pm and by appointment

David Castillo Gallery
+1 305 573 8110 Telephone

2234 NW 2nd Avenue
Miami, Florida 33127
United States

Black Atlantic

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Afro-Modernism: Journeys through the Black Atlantic
29 January – 25 April 2010

This major exhibition, 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.

From the influences of African art on the Modernist forms of artists like Picasso, to the work of contemporary artists such as Kara Walker, Ellen Gallagher and Chris Ofili, the exhibition will map out visual and cultural hybridity in modern and contemporary art that has arisen from the journeys made by people of Black African descent.

Divided into seven chronological chapters, from early twentieth century avant-garde movements such as the Harlem Renaissance to current debates around ‘Post-Black’ art, this exhibition opens up an alternative transatlantic reading of Modernism and its impact on contemporary culture for a new generation.

Tate Liverpool has initiated a city-wide programme of parallel exhibitions and events that explore the themes and ideas of Afro-Modernism: Journeys through the Black Atlantic. Partners include the Bluecoat, FACT (Foundation for Art Creative Technology), Metal, Walker Art Gallery and Liverpool University.
Supported by Liverpool City Council

centrefortheaestheticrevolutionentre

nytimes review

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Karen Rosenberg of the nytimes on ‘Space is the Place‘

Eduardo Gil
Ferrán Martín
‘Space Is the Place’
Newman Popiashvili
504 West 22nd Street, Chelsea
Through July 31

This two-man show organized by the Venezuelan artist Javier Téllez appears at first to be an exercise in Relational Aesthetics, violating the sanctity of the gallery space in various ways that have become predictable. Fortunately, the artists use the basic principles of R.A., as the movement is known, as cover for more personal investigations. It’s about them, not us.

Ferrán Martín, who is from Spain, drops the gallery’s ceiling to the height of his dead father (5 feet 4 inches). The gesture works on a number of levels. Physically, it forces all but the smallest viewers to stoop, a dictatorial imposition. (The news release notes that Manolo Martín, Ferrán’s father, was the same height as Franco.) And because the gallery is on the basement level of a town house, the dropped ceiling is below ground; it gives viewers the disconcerting feeling of being in rising floodwaters.

Eduardo Gil, a Venezuelan, has made a video of himself hitting a tennis ball off the four walls of the gallery. The piece, “Muscle Memory 2,” isn’t exactly site-specific; it’s a version of an earlier project executed in his studio. In between ground strokes, the camera cuts to cultural objects in Mr. Gil’s possession: a standard postcollegiate mix of books and albums, with the occasional baseball card thrown in. It’s silly but endearing, as if the artist were squaring off with his former self, and benefits from Mr. Martín’s altered space.

The curator, Mr. Téllez, includes himself in the exhibition. (You may remember his video of blind people interacting with an elephant, from last year’s Whitney Biennial.) Here he has designed a poster/gallery announcement that reproduces a still from Luis Buñuel’s 1969 film “La Voie Lactée” (“The Milky Way”). It shows the pope in front of a firing squad, and offers a reminder (in case anyone still needs one) that galleries aren’t sacred spaces.