Deanna Young / Untitled Wall Drawing
HIGH TIDE
+
WHIRLPOOL
& ThE fISh In ThIs SeA
curated by Jesse Firestone
Miami Art Week 2015
@ Satellite Art Show
7430 Collins Ave
Dec 1 - Dec 7, 2015
Ana Mendez, Laurencia Strauss, Deanna Young,
Neil Bender, TVGOV, Matthew Evan Taylor, GUESTWORK
Featured in:
Hyperallergic, Widewalls' Top Ten, Miami's Not To Miss
Against Regurgitative Potential
HIGH TIDE explores the various ways artists in South Florida confront the intersection of unattainable, paradisal ideals and urban development, safe-space making, and sustainability in South Florida. A majority of the artworks and projects have moving parts that function outside the studio, turning the gallery into a place for experimentation, staging, and disseminating information. The show features the remnants and documentation of performative gestures, sculpture, digital media, photography, sound-compositions, painting, and non traditional architectural models. Together these works create narratives that reflect on some of the current socio-political and economic conditions in Miami by excavating raw emotion, shady political dealings, and hard truths while simultaneously using our frustration as a call to arms to think critically about our surroundings and take action through participatory art. The exhibtion is conceptually bookended by two works: TVGOV’s Nightmare Americana and Strauss’ New Grounds - the problem and a solution. Mendez, Young, Bender, Taylor, and Strauss present splinter-narratives that contribute an even greater sense of urgency and depth through visceral and gestural works.
HIGH TIDE was organized in October and November, while surveying art across South Florida, and reinforces the presence of contemporary art in Miami by bringing together alumni or current residents from multiple Miami-based programs like Cannonball, ArtCenter South Florida, Artist in Residence in Everglades, and Sofla-Culture blog Tropicult. The exhibition also presents an important opportunity for early and mid-career artists living in South Florida to exhibit work that is critical and reflective, not market-based, during Art Basel.
TVGOV / Nightmare Americana, Niel Bender / High Water Risin', Laurencia Strauss / New Grounds
TVGOV / Nightmare Americana, Niel Bender / High Water Risin', Laurencia Strauss / New Grounds, Matthew Evan Taylor / On Ambience
TVGOV / Nightmare Americana
TVGOV Nightmare Americana, Laurencia Strauss / New Grounds, Niel Bender / High Water Risin', Matthew Evan Taylor / On Ambience, Laurencia Strauss / Mickey Mouse Operations: A Gift To Paul Singer
Niel Bender / High Water Risin', Laurencia Strauss / Mickey Mouse Operations: A Gift To Paul Singer
Laurencia Strauss / Mickey Mouse Operations: A Gift To Paul Singer
TVGOV Nightmare Americana, Laurencia Strauss / New Grounds, Niel Bender / High Water Risin', Matthew Evan Taylor / On Ambience, Laurencia Strauss / Mickey Mouse Operations: A Gift To Paul Singer Deanna Young / Untitled Wall Drawings
TVGOV Nightmare Americana, Laurencia Strauss / New Grounds, Niel Bender / High Water Risin'
Laurencia Strauss / New Grounds, Niel Bender / High Water Risin', Deanna Young / Untitled Wall Drawings
TVGOV / Nightmare Americana, Laurencia Strauss / New Grounds, Niel Bender / High Water Risin'
Laurencia Strauss / New Grounds
Laurencia Strauss / New Grounds, GUESTWORK / Maintaining Paradise
Laurencia Strauss / New Grounds
Ana Mendez / Record Keeper
Laurencia Strauss / New Grounds
Laurencia Strauss / New Grounds, Deanna Young / Untitled Wall Drawings , Neil Bender / High Water Risin', Brian Whiteley / Beached Sasquatch
Deanna Young / Untitled Wall Drawing
Deanna Young / Untitled Wall Drawing
GUESTWORK / Maintaining Paradise
Below is an explanation of each work.
TVGOV / Nightmare Americana
vinyl lettering, looped gif, printed maps
The art-activist collective TVGOV are #sprawlbusters and use facts or indexical surveys to rally people around a cause. Nightmare Americana is actively protesting the development of American Dream Miami, a mega mixed-use entertainment complex at the edge of the Everglades. On November 21st, 2015 TVGOV led a bus tour, sponsored by Bas Fisher Invitational, to major points of commerce including The Port of Miami, The Dolphin Mall, and the proposed site for American Dream Miami. Their anti-capitalist tourist maps allow visitors to recreate the tour and navigate the city as TVGOV did. If you aren't already irate, just sit and meditate on their looped-gif showing the endless destruction of the Everglades - South Florida’s main source of fresh water.
Neil Bender / High Water Risin’
paint
Neil Bender is a Tampa based painter that is interested in using that canvas as a way to paint the gross excess of consumption in contemporary society that is shrouded in makeup, glitz, and false projections. His wall works are the only paintings in HIGH TIDE and, while frameless themselves, they frame the exhibition spatially and conceptually. The bloated and liquefying palm trees are a stark contrast to the typified Miami-postcard and present a nightmarish portrayal of the sunshine state’s most iconic tree. These wall paintings act as a formal backdrop and section off the walls to help create a balanced and enveloping environment.
Matthew Evan Taylor / On Ambience
single channel video, audio recording
Matthew Evan Taylor is a composer interested in the improvisational, social nature of music and the visceral response between musicians, audience, and architecture. On Ambience is the record of an improvisational performance that took place at 7430 Collins Ave in the weeks leading up to Miami Art Week. Taylor’s mournful saxophone and voyeuristic video creates an unsettling experience where we are grounded by and confronted with our current surroundings striped and bare, just as it will be after Miami Art Week.
Ana Mendez / Record Keeper
florida limestone, sand, alligator skull, stool, black velvet, cassette tape, audio recording
Ana Mendez’s sculptural installation creates a cove anchored in old earth and bone. The alligator skull is enlivened by the sounds of the Everglades with a renewed, uncanny presence that is ethereal and inescapable. The heat lamp and audio recordings warm the viewer, making for a comfortable and meditative space. Record Keeper is an exercise in place-making and carving out respite using nature and magic to escape the ever-growing junkspace.
Deanna Young / Untitled Wall Drawings
pencil, marker
Deanna Young’s pencil-mural is the most recognizable form of art in High Tide. The mural, filled with Miami related content, was built over a period of two weeks in bursts of six to nine hours of continuous drawing. The lines are thin but the scenes are thick in detail and actively carry you along that wall. These stream of consciousness drawings create new contexts through juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated content, making for new discoveries and long lasting entertainment.
Laurencia Strauss / Mickey Mouse Operations, A Gift To Paul Singer
inkjet prints, single channel video
Laurencia Strauss’ Mickey Mouse Operations is a response to Paul Singer and his hedge fund, Elliott Management, for making a predatory loan to Argentina. In an act of protest and stewardship, Strauss cleaned all the dog feces off one block of Calle Espinosa in Buenos Aires, added sugar and flour, shaped and baked the dough, transported the goods to the United States, and finally delivered her gift to Singer’s planters outside his New York office. Strauss’ project parallels Singer’s useless gesture and begins to illuminate the still present and far-reaching grasp of American Colonialism guised as a legal method of business development.
Laurencia Strauss / New Grounds
live compost, florida grown plants, paper shredder
Laurencia Strauss is an artist that works directly with land and city. Her modular-compost sculpture, New Grounds, offers an innovative way of dealing with our waste. Each bin is filled with paper, sand, worms, and foodstuff: compost. Artists and visitors were encouraged to, and did, shred their paper-ephemera to be later used as the foundation for more bins. All the compost produced in the space will feed the banana plants or be packaged for viewers to take with them as offerings to other plants. While New Grounds is a sculptural system, each bin can be looked at as an individual model for sustainable, compost-based land art. Strauss’ notes that these compost bins can float, a quality she believes is crucial to making new and productive land.
GUESTWORK / Maintaining Paradise
GUESTWORK is one of the many partnerships between Erin Charpentier and Travis Neel, two Portland based artists that are deeply invested in developing our capacity to cooperate with and understand the other's role in societal systems and imposed hierarchies. Their publication Maintaing Paradise features interviews with janitors, bakers, and other custodial workers that make their living mainting the picture perfect aesthetic of South Florida.
A pdf can be found here: Maintaining Paradise
HIGH TIDE exhibition tour with audio!
HIGHTIDEVIDEO from Jesse Bandler Firestone on Vimeo.
WHIRLPOOL at HIGH TIDE was a nighttime installation featuring the psychedelic visuals of Joe Winograd and Ana Mendez's Everglade's audio recordings. Visitors could sit back and relax in a tranquil space away from the daily grind and let the sounds of nature and trippy visuals wash over them. Patrons had the opportunity to purchase a massage on site for less than one dollar a minute.
IMG_1147 from Jesse Bandler Firestone on Vimeo.
ThE fIsH iN tHiS sEa is an open call video art program hosted with Tropicult. All Florida based artists were invited to submit video works. The following artist's works were screened during HIGH TIDE:
Caitlin Burns, Brian Whitely, Brian Deutzman, Jose Garza, Micheal Finnigan, Laurencia Strauss, and Juan Carlos Zaldivar
Laurencia Strauss / Don't Ask Don't Tell
Brian Deutzman / A Summer Home
Brian Whiteley / Sasquatch Washed
Juan Carlos Zaldivar / How To Series
Juan Carlos Zaldivar / Swamp Light