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The Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum in Miami inaugurated the exhibition “Deconstruction: A reordering of life, politics, and art” on Saturday, July 14th. Twelve local artists who wanted to make a close comparison on art through their works, each with their own style but with the same goal: highlighting the implicit assumptions, hidden prejudices and latent contradictions of the culture and the language that “we live” not too consciously. To warn society from the social interaction mediated by images, claiming their autonomy and individual experience through the creation of situations, artistic and cultural experiences through which the individual can find his or her condition as an active subject in reality.
And this is how Sandra Ramos, Cuban artist, known for her surreal artistic expression in the relationship with the political and social situation of Cuba and known mainly for her recordings, composes Apocalyptic Cartographies Limbus. In the work she identifies her “Ariadne” (the imaginary character of her works, in this case represented by her nephew) with an innocent face lying on a mattress that recalls an almost lifeless boat, covered by a slab of engraved plexiglass that recalls the theme of Immigration, the physical passage through that little piece of “liquid” (the sea) to find shelter from a Cuba devastated by the dissolution of the former Soviet Union and the US imposed embargo: difficult situations that imposed equally difficult choices for the artist, hence the theme of alienation and isolation.
The photographic art of Zachary Balber, inspired by the raw photography of Swedish Robert Frank, focuses on Miami residents. He portrays different realities belonging to the marginalized Miami: between these two images, a child in the wheelchair of his mother and Julia Tuttle, Hidden Spirits. The latter takes the name of the bridge given in memory of Julia Tuttle, widow who moved from Ohio, on whose land Miami was born and where homeless people find shelter. The expression of the semi hidden face and the eyes represent the alienation and poverty of the homeless.
The large installation by Pepe Mar, Varla Tv, focuses on Craig Coleman, contemporary artist of J.M. Basquiat and K. Haring, very active in the East side of New York, has composed numerous paintings and sculptures and then moved to Miami Beach and gave life to drag performances with the pseudonym of Varla. He died prematurely, and made his art available to raise funds for AIDS patients, just like him. Pepe Mar has collected his posters, and some of his paintings, including a self-portrait of Farla with the inscription “I will not die” and he has mixed and arranged them on an entire wall to remember his important passage, in the artistic panorama of Miami Beach.
Eddie Arroyo paints in plain-air corners of Miami. His subjects are mostly linked to gentrification with everything that the phenomenon entails, starting with the loss of their identity, as in the work 1294 NW 54th St Miami.
Leyden Rodriguez-Casanova incorporating objects found in the work “A Degrade Door and Blind”, focuses his attention on the vulnerability of objects and human existence in the fight against economic supremacy.
Francis Trombly expresses his art in a delicate and laborious way, mixing traditional art and textile production in order to deconstruct the artistic rules and create strips of cotton woven by hand. In Loose Canvas with Pink Embrodery, he deliberately starts with aframe that is uncovered with a canvas that, instead of covering it, is wisely arranged with a pink corner that emerges from above and seems to wink at the disturbed gaze of the spectator when he finds himself in front of a work with a lack of institutional expectations.
Christopher Carter’s sculptures, on the other hand, are large-scale works, made up of waste materials collected over time and in different places, from Boston to San Francisco and then reassembled and re-proposed in a new perspective. The work exhibited, named Cross Cultural Trap consists of a wooden cross – wood preserved for 15 years by the artist -, enamel and recovered materials. The sculpture is the metaphor of a trap, the shape of the cross represents the label that society puts on us inevitably channeling us into a category; the red rope is the knot that keeps us tied to this trap as innocent victims when unconsciously educated in this way of seeing things.
Yanira Collado, Dominican artist, and veteran of the strength of Hurricane Andrew, represents in her work Fuku, agora te haces qui no me conoces, the structure of a solid house, composed of soap bars that reveal the sense of coverage and protection as if they were a spell that permeates reality from natural disasters affecting the areas of Florida and South America.
Converting his work into an instrument of social and political criticism, Glexis Novoa aims to make universally evident the convergence of the strategies used by the different systems of totalitarian power, representing architectural landscapes, and highlighting the indissoluble link between architecture and power, already expressed at the time by the Italian Giovanni Battista Piranesi. Glexis Novoa has used different artistic supports to finally arrive at the focal use of marble as a base for the graphite of which it is widely used. On display there are both canvas and marble works, including Timba.
The art of Gonzalo Fuenmayor is characterized by the use of graphite on canvas that he uses in an extremely refined way in taking care of details and details. The topics on which his art is related are mainly related to the tropics, and in particular the large-scale work exhibited, “The Happy Hour”, represents in a meticulous way the decorations of the high-alcoholic cocktails served in the tropics. The decorations seem to float in the air as if to seek a seemingly endless universe beyond which only the precariousness of the ephemeral and the temporary stand out.
Jamila Sabur exhibits Declaration, a work composed of her own biometric photo of 2008 with which she applied for citizenship by inserting the intermediate name SIBINE-ELA-AKUM which in the language Timucua – language spoken by the locals before the Spanish invasion – means water-sun-moon. The art of Jamila Sabur focuses on the sense of research on colonial ramifications and on the historical roots of colonialism in Florida, above all as a sense of self-seeking and searching through the layers of nature’s debris over the course of which Range of the West Indian Manatee is an example.
Frida Baranek, a Brazilian architect and artist, is known for her large-scale sculptures working with a variety of materials: resin with steel, iron, stone, recycled materials like, wooden boxes, light bulbs and electric wire. In the work exhibited Uncertainty Relations IX, she reorganizes her art, manipulating metal, galvanized metal and copper wires to create the illusion of movement.
