Royal Palm South Beach, 1545 Collins Ave, Miami Beach
reception Fri, Dec 2, 5-7 pm
A checklist of works exhibited is here.
VOTE!!! for this project at mbartsandculture.org.
The winner of a Public Vote will be awarded $10,000
Out of 12 artists participating, one winner of a Juried Prize and one winner of a Public Prize will be announced on December 8, 2022.
@miamibeachnews #MBArtsandCulture
Much of the subject and motivation for my work comes out of a desire to recover value and meaning from the banal, the overlooked, the disposable.
For No Vacancy, sponsored by the City of Miami Beach, I am exhibiting drawings that consider the experience of living at the water’s edge. Tides, winds, waves, corals, surges, drains, retaining walls, overflow, vortices and wayward weather patterns make their own poetry. The scenarios are not without humor. We adopt the imperfect human position of treading water, naturally buoyant, keeping ordinary life afloat. We wait and reflect on a changing planet, in our homes, on the street, in hotel lobbies. The artworks muse on the collision of forces from the natural world with the fragile built environment, noting the erosion and disintegration that occurs. Banal slogans and notes to self are fragmented broadcasts, set free from normal context. Snippets of texts and flickering patterns are subjected to the same entropic (Tropic?) forces that bedevil architecture.
The drawings in Treading Water are made by slipping carbon paper between folded sheets of mulberry paper, which transfers imagery from one side of the page to the other, a kind of pseudo printing process. The used black carbon papers are “negatives,” engraved with the layered residue of my drawing marks over time. When illuminated by lightboxes, their skeletal architectures are revealed – Night Drawings. The manufacture of carbon paper, an almost obsolete material, is related to the carbon that is derived from the earth, and is now perilously suspended in our atmosphere due to the oxidization of fossil fuels.
The large-scale transparent works are enlarged from images of the Night Drawings, and pieced together like quilts. The transparencies convert features in the Royal Palm’s interior into lightboxes.
Each drawing, lightbox and art installation in the Royal Palm South Beach lobby compresses the flotsam and jetsam of the 21st century into intimately scaled tableaux of fantasy and failure, re-use and restoration.
Thank you to Brandi Reddick and her team at Miami Beach Tourism and Culture Department, and to the amazing staff at Royal Palm South Beach, especially Blake, Sara, Jose, Keith, Mohammed and Karen.