IRREVERSIBLE Frida Kahlo

ELBISREVERRI TM

An International Art Project

"What does your museum feel like,"? Norelkys (Noor) Blazekovic

During the past five years my aim, among others, has been to uncover hidden histories. A number of museums, both in the United States and abroad, have been sources for my research and this has afforded me the privilege of meeting and interviewing museum directors, administrators, and staff. My research also includes those museums that are falling short of their mark. One cannot help but wonder if a “leadership crisis movement” is the cause. In the name of good journalism and the quest for truth, we contacted the Miami Museum to ask poignant questions to the new museum director, Thomas Collins, but alas, he did not return our phone call. The following questions arise: Why the need of recently firing a loyal 6 years employee? Is their business model failing? Is their staff burned out? Back on April 2, 2000 the Miami City Commission voted to accomplish the revival of Bicentennial Park. During that time, the Miami Museum of Science and the Miami Art Museum completed a multi-year site and funding analysis for the development of two new world-class institution at BicentennialPark. The following facts are for the readers consideration: Scheduled construction on January 2011 | Completion Spring 2013-Open to the public fall 2013- Budget construction $131 million-Endowment $69 million-Transition $20 million-Total $220 million-Public funding $100 million-Private funding $120 million². WHO IS ACCOUNTABLE IN THIS MATTER? Warren Bennis, founding chairperson of the leader institution at the University of Southern California, negates the myth that leaders exists only at the top of the organization and that leaders are born, not made. I feel that nothing could be more further from the truth. Leadership is more about “creating environments that influence staff and others to achieve group goals.” The leadership model at Dale Carnegie Training emphasizes empowerment, rather than making people meet deadlines and objectives. We must focus on developing skills based on relationships, self-directed individuals and work groups that lead to continued growth and improvement. The apparent egotistical, conflictive nature of some of the local museums in Miami has motivated me (and hopefully my readers) to visit more museums. I strongly suggest that you give yourself a holiday and New Year’s gift to visit four museums that I consider to be inspiring models that understand and live up to their mission. They are the Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale (MOA), the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami (MOCA), The Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum at Florida International University, and the Wolfsonian Florida International University Museum. These museums value their audience, their staff and the benefits of teamwork across departments. Their leadership and exhibition teams provide educational and programmatic excellence. These empowering principles that makes a GREAT museum.

In an attempt to turn my disillusionment of my experience with the Miami Art Museum to something postive IRREVERSIBLE continuously celebrates powerful examples of empowerment. None of us can see what directions the world will take in the future, and events that seem monumental today might turn out to be mere pebbles on the road of history. But there are some achievements so notable, so ground breaking, that even within the short space of a decade we can feel their impact. The New World Symphony America’s Orchestral Academy could not be a better example. Frank Gehry said “I am very proud of this building, which results from a close working relationship with my lifelong friend Michael Tilson Thomas and brings to life his dream for New World Symphony and the entire world of classical music. I hope the spirit of creative engagement that Michael and I have enjoyed will live on in the building’s spaces. They are designed to encourage young musicians, their mentors and their audiences to try new things, interact in new ways and remain open to new experiences.”

Noor Blazekovic VENEZUELA

See you at the Fairs! Noor Blazekovic. I do not feel inhibited or bound by what I am. That does not mean that I have never had bad scenes relating to being an immigrant and /or a woman, it means that other people’s craziness has not managed to make me crazy. I write from my knowledge not my lack thereof, from my strength not my weakness. I am not interested if anyone knows whether or not I am familiar with big words, I am interested in trying to render big ideas in a simple way. I am interested in being understood not admired! Lucille Clifton (American poet, 1936- ) 1.Urban Design Museum Park (Bicentennial Park) Master Plan. City of Miami planning department | http://ci.miami.fl.us/planning/pages/master_plans/Bicentennial.asp

Founder Publisher /Chief Editor Norelkys Blazekovic norelkysb@@ @™ irreversiblemagazine.com

2.www.miamiartmuseum.org/library /New_MAM_Fact_Sheet.pdf

Curator Alejandro Mendoza Creative Team Flavio Galvan (Creative Director) Camilo Lopez David Garcia Contributors Ricardo Pau-Llosa Lynn Bentley- Kemp Janet Batet Kristin Reger Lara Szabo Greisman Kristin Hjellegjerde Carlos Suarez De Jesus Nick Smith Raul Magaldi Franklin Blanco Special Thanks to Natasha Kertes www.natashakertes.com Sarah Trigg www.sarahtrigg.com Tomas Loewy www.tomasloewy.com Bernice Steinbaum The Bernice Steinbaum Gallery for their unconditional support to this edition!

Janet Batet CUBA

Kristin Reger USA

Kristin Hjellegjerde UK Lara Szabo Greisman CANADA Lynn Bentley- Kemp USA

Special thanks to Kristin Reger whom is an artist and illustrator. Her work uses experimental fashion iconography to challenge rigid notions of beauty and style. She lives in New York City|« - www.kristinreger.com

The Rejuvenated Miami Beach Botanical Garden

A 2.6-acre urban greenspace renovation by acclaimed South Florida landscape architect Raymond Jungles

Welcome to Miami Beach Botanical – aGarden dynamic– a dynamic Welcome to Miami BeachGarden Botanical 2.6-acre urban greenspace in the heartin of 2.6-acre urban greenspace theSouth heartBeach. of South Beach. Created asCreated a Miami as Beach City Beach park inCity 1962, theinGarden a Miami park 1962, the Garden was rejuvenated in the fall of a $1.2with Million was rejuvenated in 2011 the fallwith of 2011 a $1.2 Million landscape landscape renovation renovation by acclaimed South Florida by acclaimed South Florida landscape architect WeJungles. invite you landscapeRaymond architect Jungles. Raymond We to invite you to discover the new features the Garden a wetland discover the newoffeatures of the– Garden – a wetland with red mangrove pond apple trees,apple an expansive with red and mangrove and pond trees, an expansive water garden withgarden cascading fountain, a welcoming water withoolite cascading oolite fountain, a welcoming entrance plaza, and diverse collection of flowering entrance plaza, and diverse collection oftrees, flowering trees, palms, cycads, orchids, and Floridaandnative palms, cycads,bromeliads orchids, bromeliads Florida native species. With enhanced pathways, plazas species. With lighting, enhanced lighting, event pathways, event plazas and a spacious the Garden been designed and alawn, spacious lawn, thehasGarden has beenasdesigned as an exquisite for venue weddings, and social corporate an venue exquisite for social weddings, and corporate events. Contact us about opportunities for naming water events. Contact us about opportunities for naming water features, benches trees and and trees for volunteering as features, and benches and for volunteering as docents, with horticulture and in the and office. Please stopPlease stop docents, with horticulture in the office. to smell thetoylang-lang, the Japanese smell the meditate ylang-lang,inmeditate in theSerenity Japanese Serenity Garden, walk on the Zoysia grass and enjoy yourenjoy time your time Garden, walk on the Zoysia grass and with us. with us. Laura Jamieson Laura Jamieson Executive Director Executive Director

Miami BeachMiami Botanical Garden Beach Botanical Garden 2000 Convention Center Dr. Center D 2000 Convention Miami Beach,Miami FL 33139 Beach, FL 33139 305-673-7256 305-673-7256 Tuesday | Sunday 9AM| Sunday to 5PM9AM to 5PM Tuesday Admission FREE Admission FREE

Photos Tomas Loewy | www.coolpoolevents.com | www.tomasloewy.com Photos Tomas Loewy | www.coolpoolevents.com | www.tomasloewy.com

The Miami Beach Botanical Garden is owned by the City of Miami Beach and Miami BeachGarden Botanical Garden is owned by the City of Miami Beach and operated by theThe Miami Beach Conservancy. The Garden’s annual operated the Miamiis Beach Garden with Conservancy. The schedule of arts and cultural by programming made possible the support of Garden’s annual schedule of arts and cultural programming is made possible with the support of the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs and the Cultural Affairs the Miami-Dade Countyand Department of Cultural Affairs and the Cultural Affairs Council, the Miami-Dade County Mayor Board of County Commissioners, Council, theDepartment Miami-DadeofCounty and Board of County Commissioners, and the City of Miami Beach TourismMayor and Cultural Development, and the City of Miami Beach Department of Tourism and Cultural Development, Office of Cultural Affairs, and the Miami Beach Mayor and City Commissioners Office of Cultural Affairs, and the Miami Beach Mayor and City Commissioners

Polatsek

Counsellors at Law

Franklin A. Blanco Esq. (NY & NJ Bars)

A law firm, the practice of which is limited to Imigration and Nationality matters, including artists, performers, entertainers, professionals and investors

The irreverent realism of paco Pomet Janet Batet

El heredero | Oil on canvas | 120 x 103 cms | 2006

The art of Paco Pomet (Granada, 1970) is highly iconoclastic. His painting is heir to that longstanding tradition in Western art where the credible becomes a double-edged sword and starting point for the significant distortions that shake the viewer astonished eye. As a result, Pomet’s work is part of that long-standing tradition that Duchamp defined as retinal art. A tradition that has haunted painters since the Antiquity in their efforts to grasp reality. It is this obsession that guides Zeuxis and Parrhasius to mock the human eye; or the inspiration that guides fundamental contributions of the Renaissance era such as perspective and chiaroscuro. However, Pomet’s artwork is an echo of that twist, heir to the crisis that occurs in the arts after the emergence of the photography in the late nineteenth century that demolishes every single effort throughout the History of of representing reality as truthfully as possible. His proposal is part of that line of research associated with the crisis of representation consequence of this historical fracture that begins then and still ongoing nowadays. Here are located two fundamental avant-garde movements: the metaphysical painting and the Surrealism, to which we owe the emergence of new ways of unusual exploration of realism that continues to these days. Both tendencies introduce two key elements that will be revisited by contemporary art realistic tradition, including Pomet.

Ost-West | Oil on canvas | 200 x 200 cms. | 2006

Sin título | Oil on canvas | 40 x 50 cms. 2009| (3)

La pajarita rosa | Oil on canvas | 40 x 50 cms | 2010

Andrómeda | Oil on canvas | 120 x 150 cms | 2009

These two elements are the free association introduced by the Surrealism and the alienation effect that characterizes the metaphysical painting.The dislocation that results from what is seen and what it is the key premise that supports the work of Paco Pomet. This principle of contradiction present in Magritte’s early series Ceci n'est une pipe, is largely revisited by other movements of the second half of the twentieth century as the Conceptualism, the Hyperrealism and, the new Neoclassicism that arises in the late twentieth, of which is an exponent Pintora Colta, in Italy. However, although the work of Paco Pomet drinks from this common heritage that is the evolution of realism in Western art history, his primary inspiration comes from other sources associated with the impact of mass culture and the entertainment in our time. These sources are dissimilar, highlighting among others cartoons, television series and Silent comedies. But within them, which deeply marked Pomet’s childhood were those where the hilarious, absurdity and the exaggeration made us jump out of our seats. Here we find classics like “Looney Tunes”, “The Pink Panther” or, “The Marx Brothers”; Charlie Chaplin and, Laurel and Hardy. Later, other references are incorporated to the artist’s background: Buñuel, Bergman, Fellini, Herzog, Kurosawa, Woody Allen, among others. The hilarity and smart sense of humor dominant in series like The Flying Circus (by Monty Python) or Asterix and Obelix (by René Goscinny and Albert Underzo) are also crucial shaping Pomet’s unique universe which artistic proposal is characterized by an perennial existential quest. His work explores that perplexity that is being alive and polar emotions associated with our existence. That explains why is so natural in Pomet’s artworks the coexistence between the natural and the artificial; the dramatic and the hilarious; the real and the impossible. From the formal standpoint, the uses of the figurative painting allows Pomet –who possesses a profound technical mastery of the technique – the recreation scenarios with very realistic atmospheres. The fact that the artist uses the photography as the starting point often contributes to emphasize the notion of realism that is later dismantled by a discordant element introduced in the scene. Pomet uses the historic photography with a dual purpose. First, to emphasize the veridical nature of the image. Then in a second reading, the artist uses the alienation feeling resulting from epochal differences. Most of the photographs are from the sixties and always contain items (cars, trains, appliances) that reinforce the epoch while also increasing the chasm with today audience. In this sense, the use of monochrome paintings recently incorporated in Pomet’s works, becomes essential.For the artist, the use of monochrome paintings is primarily associated with the desire to eliminate the distraction of color, enabling the emphasis of areas of interest through the use of of chiaroscuro. In fact, one of the major visual influences for the artist are Tenebrist master painters of the Spanish Golden Age such as Ribera, Zurbaran and Goya.

Herencia | Oil on canvas | 110 x 160 cms. | 2008| (2)

In addition, the monochrome effect operates as a restatement of the alleged documentary character that typifies Paco Pomet’s images, at least in avery first approach. However, as soon as we are drawn to the scene, the twist mechanism overcomes. What we assumed to be real it is not. When Pomet introduces the elements of discordance so dear to his painting he is introducing a fundamental existential problem of our time: the crisis of any metanarrative associated with the exhausted Modernity, like the idea of progress or the notion of History. Hence, far from being contradictory, the coexistence of the real with the absurd, the grotesque or ironic end to be entirely harmonious. Among the most characteristic distorting elements within Pomet’s work highlight hyperbole, personification, metaphor, palimpsest, distortions of scale, and absurdity. The subversion of the original reinforces the ontological questions that Pomet pursues throughout his work, and which is a reflection of the bewilderment and the skepticism of the time we live in, characterized by a growing number of crises over the world. We are confronted with a work where irony and absurdity are the gateway to a host of questions concerning the contemporary era. The appropriation of History and the distorting elements become a critical practice that –like image in a mirror– addresses our time, stigmatized by the nihilism and the discredit. Paco Pomet’s oeuvre is somehow a collective portrait of our era. Sunset Park | 2007 | Oil on canvas 1 30 x 140 cms

Paco Pomet received a Fine Arts Degree from Universidad de Granada, Spain with an Erasmus Exchange (1992) at Loughborough College of Art and Design, United Kingdom. His work has recently been exhibited at Muralla Bizantina, Cartagena, Spain, My Name's Lolita Art, Madrid, Spain and Monya Rowe Gallery, NYC. Current Exhibition Horns and Tales, October 29th, 2011 - December 17, 2011. Richard Heller Gallery, Santa Monica, California. Pomet lives and works in Granada, Spain. pacopomet.wordpress.com

Janet Batet is an independent curator, art critic and essayist based in Miami. A former researcher and curator at the Centro de Desarrollo de las Artes Visuales (Development Center of Visual Arts) and Professor at the Insituto Superior de Arte (Higher Institute of Art), both in Havana, Cuba .She is passionate about Contemporary art, Latin American art and new technologies. She has written and lectured extensively on contemporary art issues as well as served as an art critic for a number of national and international publications.

Sizes I. | 2010 | 40 x 50 cms

Sizes II. | 2010 | 40 x 50 cms

Sizes III. | 2010 | 40 x 50 cms

Sizes IV. | 2010 | 40 x 50 cms

Tour de France | Florida

Contemporary Artists from France in Florida’s Private Collections

by Carol Damian Director and Chief Curator The Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum Florida International University, Miami

Tour de France/Florida: Contemporary Artists from France in Florida’s Private Collections The long fascination with French Art in the United States began over one hundred years ago when Paris dominated the avant-garde and the fledgling American art scene looked across the sea for its inspiration (and to catch up). Nouveau-riche collectors and curious artists arrived in France and quickly became the patrons and the students, bringing back with them works of art that even the French at the time did not understand or appreciate and new styles and ideas that would forever change the way we make and look at art. Even after World War II changed the dynamic and the art scene moved to New York, a move that included many European artists, the French among them, the influence of the many “isms” that determined the trajectory of artistic development and its art historical discourse continued, and continues into the present. The art world today is small, global, without the boundaries and barriers of the vast oceans, politics, cultural differences and language. Art fairs, biennials, internet communication, traveling exhibitions, and new art publications have brought everyone closer together with the ability to appreciate and experience what was not possible before. This exhibition of Tour de France/Florida: Contemporary Artists from France in Florida’s Private Collections is just a glimpse into that global picture and brings together a number of interesting perspectives as it showcases artists of international renown, like Christian Boltanski and Sophie Calle; artists not well recognized in Florida, outside of the circle of well-versed collectors, like Jean-Pierre Khazem and Denise A. Aubertin, and young artists like Gyan Panchal. The collectors first became familiar with their works in a number of ways: museum exhibitions, travel to France, art fairs, auctions and galleries. The curator, Martine Buissart, worked in cooperation with the Institut Francais, the Cultural Services of the French Embassy and the French Consulate, the France Florida Foundation for the Arts (FFFA) and The Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum to present this unique opportunity to view French Art in Miami. Ms. Buissart, with years of experience working in France with the artists and the art scene, found the task to be quite revealing. There were many more important French artists in Florida collections than she first imagined and with each visit, more works became available. She paid particular attention to artists who live or have lived in Florida, such as Dominique Labauvie, Johan Creten and Hervé di Rosa. Most intriguing, of course, is that such an exhibition may offer us an insight into the collecting process of the esteemed group of collectors participating, as we view a particular aspect of their acquisitions, works from France, and how, why and what they represent to their personal buying strategies. Each work has a story for the collector, another reason an exhibition from private collections is different from a curated museum show based on a singular theme or artist. These works belong to private individuals and were chosen for their own reasons, not because of a museum’s acquisition or exhibition process. There are artists who work in a variety of media: painting, sculpture, books and works on paper, photography, and assemblages that combine materials in unique ways. Presently representing France at the Venice Biennale, Christian Boltanski has received great critical acclaim for films, photography, and large-scale installations that explore consciousness and remembering, and how each individual deals with the past in the present.

(left) Hervé Télémaque | Jambon Jean | 1994 Bois et brou de noix 220 x 101 x 25 cm Ektachrome image courtesy JC Mendez (right) Christian Boltanski | Untitled (Reserve) | 1989 Clothes, black and white photographs and lights 111x 64 x 7 in. | Copyright © 2009 Rubell Family Collection All Rights Reserved Contemporary Arts Foundation Rubell Family Collection

His assemblages in this exhibition date from the late 1980s, the period when he began to use mixed media in installations with light as an essential concept that served as a forceful reminder of mass murder of Jews by the Nazis. Over the next 20 years, the installations continued to grow, often taking up entire spaces (like the Park Avenue Armory in 2010), and this year in Venice, he again demonstrated his ability to deal with universal themes, memory, destiny and chance, while at the same time ensuring that everyone is free to interpret his work in their own way, while interacting with the huge moving film strip apparatus. The use of mundane objects and traditional processes used in accumulative ways is a constant throughout the exhibition. Using completely different approaches to mixed media assemblages, other artists experiment with materials old and new for provocative combinations that address similar issues of memory and nostalgia. Annette Messager’s work often involves fragments and obsessive accumulations of objects with drawings, photographs, and traditionally feminine materials and techniques. This repetitive process of accumulation is practiced by Hervé Télémaque as he manipulates the photographic process into objects that take them completely away from their original two-dimensional origins. His use of collage and assemblages made from common everyday objects inform work that marks a conversion from two-dimensions into a bas-relief aesthetic. Johan Creten takes the idea of accumulation to obsession as he transforms a human torso covered with glazed stoneware, fragile but dangerous, to allude to the complexity of the universe as he imagines it. He is fascinated by woman and her hidden powers. Claude Viallat, one of France’s most distinguished teachers and artists, initiated the group that became the “Support/Surfaces” movement in 1969, of great significance to this exhibition, where surfaces and their conditions for the application of paint and other materials are essential. His paintings on freely hanging fabrics feature repeating patterns of simple color abstractions. Undoubtedly, throughout the exhibition, the boundaries that may have once existed between materials have been blurred. Artists incorporate a diversity of media in remarkable ways. Paintings take on new meanings with surfaces that range from the almost ephemeral to brashly abstract, while sculptors use materials that range from traditional metals now conceived as monumental abstractions by Bernar Venet to line drawings suspended in space by Dominique Labauvie. In France, there has long been this exploration of surfaces for innovative effects. Once the artists of the nineteenth century decided to rebel against the strict rules of the Academy and devise new approaches to the application of paint on canvas, the series of “isms” began and the rest is art history. This Tour de France continues the voyage across the Atlantic into Florida with a new perspective of the future. Carol Damian Director and Chief Curator The Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum Florida International University, Miami

Jacques Halbert | Cherry Composition |1975-1990 | Acrylic on free floating canvas 220 x 206 cm image courtesy Jacques Halbert

Robaldo Rodriguez | Thetis (Acuario) | oil on canvas | 77 x 77 in. 2008

Robaldo Rodriguez | Thetis

Julio Larraz | The House of the Tragic Poet | oil on canvas | 72 x 60 in. 2002

Julio Larraz | The House of the Tragic Poet As if the sea were listening, or were being listened to, it quiets into lapis. The green tufts of life cloud on the cemetery-chalk sky of the cliffs, and a house rises, not at all strangely but heavy as the idea of destiny, which poets brought into the world. The maker of tragedies lives happily here. His house breaks the rambling flesh of nature with the taut sail of its dome and the square of its walls. The path leading to it is a ruse, a labyrinth which has been unspun and lies now on the ground like a rope that washed up from the viscous sea. No one who comes here needs a path. No one leaves. When the world comes to this door, it is the bare bones of it, the words from which characters unbury themselves. The tales matter less, broken crowns and angers the angry must never understand, and in the brute gale of incomprehensible necessity, an audience learns to bury itself in the shared grief, the stolen hope, and the kindled resignation. The circle of the dome and the square of the house signal that the divine and the earthly have mated, if briefly, cumbersomely. In the box of reason, hope will linger like lint. And this egg too will rise from the horizon of its nest to make the poet in his house feel like a cup of sky can keep darkness and lightning at bay. His house is the promontory, not the house, for he knows what happens were one to wander out in the thick of a poor moon, lost in the betraying reverie of a new being rising in the midst of departure. The cliff churns like a beast hungry from abundant sleep. The stone of sea, the bone of earth, and the stubborn leaves seed the surface of the house with their reflections. The poet is listening. This is the best they can hope for.

We have no element, for everywhere we seek a harvest of permanence we find a lost page of a missing book, a wave now spirited in foam, a sound buried in another sound. Water and not air should have been the icon of the spirit. Water was betrayed, left with the dirty work. ‘Wash away, choke in all the impurities and hold them in, as men do their breath’ when, finally, they come to me. To my world, to what should have been their image of heaven. Our father spun us out like kelp, but we learned to mingle, crossed the sandy desert that cleaves the world’s two selves, and natured there where the strangeness cannot be shaken off. The rest is a tumult that time imposes. Love, offspring—the sea character of all living, were men able to behold themselves in the flux of the beholding, as I see them. They are the like the fish in the aquarium, and I the woman sitting beside it, towering over the paltry delicate ensemble that houses them. In a cubed goblet they hover and dip into and out of the ornamental rock, and glisten as they stay, for as long as they wish, in one place by the unthought figure-eight’s of their fins. These creatures, who might once have known me, now experience me—as a cataract which they might compose into a melody, a few letters meshing into a word, a jarring shift in temperature that is, in its own way, welcome.

Paul Sierra | The Sun under the Trees | oil on canvas | 32 x 44 in. 2010 Collection of L. Leone

Paul Sierra | The Sun Under the Trees

ABLUTIONS: FOUR EXILES Ricardo Pau-Llosa

Ismael Gómez-Peralta | Asedios 1, oil on canvas | 58-1/2" X 69-1/2" | 2010

Ismael Gómez-Peralta: Asedios, I It might as well be fire and smoke, this water singeing the glass through which I must ponder the city that will soon be no more. Though it shone by the sea, it was not the sea which stormed the town, razed it, and left. Neither did the land heave up, rile its hidden flames, pummel with ash. And the invaders, really, were no different from the natives. They worshipped the same language, and the spoke to the same gods. Didn’t the natives call down from the mind of heaven their broken fate, their sudden end without the mercy of a plot’s wind-down? Now the city is very much like the panic of droplets and smears on the glass through which I see it, inside this car, against my will, remembering already what is still here, if in name only. That I must leave and remember is already a reminder that I have left and recall poorly, will lose the street and the shadow; eventually even the smells and the tastes will desert me. For something in the place—the spirit that moves it—is already erasing me, wiping the glass with the grime that clocks neglect. I will think there is a striking similarity between the crash of the waves against the seawall and the swirls on the glass, but were I not from here, I would not have such an easy time with delusion.

He cannot return to the river and so must imagine it as another ground. He can come to its very edge and see how the sun, just now slung beneath the branches behind him, makes its way to the river’s marble of etched lights to become that bronze tongue that angles make of water at certain, precise moments the day. The sun finds its fire in heaven but its forge beneath the rock of night, salvaging what it can from density, melting time, pushing the man, who is over-dressed for natural abandon, into a greater commitment to that edge, that murky weedy edge which, still technically land, has already denied him. All this because it is night, his night, the very dimension of his being in which he can walk the summer grounds others find unsettling, in his warm suit and tight hat, and pretend to himself that he just might slip and fall. It’s a game he must play to be sure he is alone. He calls the shots, and they come right to him, never miss. The sun shreds into bullets, the trees flatten into ruptures of dark lace, and the man who can never be happy is briefly comforted by the way the light and the darkness converge in him. The form ambulatory is still form. Only he has tamed the lion of containment leaping through the fiery hoop of pleasure in the arena of his flesh. Could this be, he wonders, the river you can’t step out of twice?

Sarah Trigg

The Goldminer Project Nick Smith

GOLDMINER began in May of 2009. It was conceived by, and is photographed and written by, Sarah Trigg, who is a painter and photographer based in New York. She is an invited artist of the United States Artists project and was recently awarded an artist residency at LegalArt in Miami where she conducted studio visits for GOLDMINER. She is currently working toward writing a book of the US artists in the project to be published in the fall of 2012

Sarah Trigg by Natasha Kertes | www.natashakertes.com

During each summer of her childhood, Sarah Trigg would visit her grandparents in Detroit, Michigan. At their cottage across the Canadian border, she would pore through her Grandfather’s amateur photography that he had bound into dozens of books, and would read the commentary he had written beside the images. Her grandparents shared the place with another family, that she had never met, and on every visit she would find objects they had left behind—a joke book, a record, a vase, a souvenir of someone else’s life. Now a highly regarded painter based in New York, Trigg has taken this annual ritual to a new realm by photographing and writing about the curiosities of visual artists for her archive: The Goldminer Project. Unassuming and highly methodical, Trigg has exhibited her paintings widely in New York and across the U.S., including at the Neuberger Museum of Art (Purchase, NY), the Bronx Museum of the Arts (NY) and the Weatherspoon Art Museum (Greensboro, North Carolina). In the spring of 2009, she started writing down ideas—seemingly disconnected at the time— which soon coalesced into a much larger idea: to document the habits, objects of inspiration, and environments of artists from an anthropological perspective. She wondered what future anthropologists would think of artists’ studios if our society were frozen in time by a catastrophic event. As they investigated the remains, they might ask why these dwellings were so aberrant from those nearby. “I wasn’t looking to develop some big project at all,” says Trigg. At the time, however, she felt the idea was so important historically that she felt she had no choice but to pursue it. “There are lots of books about artists’ studios but this didn’t exist.” Documenting the project, meant slowing her painting practice temporarily, but her past experience in art directing, photo editing, and web design allowed for Goldminer to come together in a short amount of time. Trigg has visited over 150 studios in the US, Germany, and Buenos Aires. “A lot of the work by artists in the project is not necessarily easy to understand immediately,” she says. “You have to give it time and open up to it.” To present her documentation, she categorizes each of the artist’s examples into one of the following six categories: mascots; objects that inspire the artists; rituals and belief systems; tools they have customized; residue from their work processes; and habitat which includes examples specifically tied to their actual workspaces.

(above) Habitat | Carol Bove & Gordon Terry (NY) Inspired by Carol Bove and Gordon Terry’s Walk-in vault, a whole new dimension in the project has opened up to accommodate the examples specific to artist’s actual workspaces-peculiarities that if the artist were to leave, would remain. Also included in this category are the unusual living conditions that some artists endure for inexpensive rent, and how they see opportunities (where others may not) to carve out workspaces in unexpected places.

Makeshift tools | Kerry Tribe (LA)

Residue | Judy Ledgerwood | USA

Habitat | Nicola Costantino (ARG) For a past exhibition, Buenos Aires-based artist Nicola Constantino created a fully-functional textile fabrication area as part of a larger installation. Once it returned to the studio, she decided to keep using it for this purpose within her workspace that is mostly dedicated for metal sculpture fabrication.

Residue | Judy Ledgerwood | CHI

Habitat

Shaun O’Dell & Emily Prince (San Fran)

Jesse Reding Fleming (LA) It is an agave plant that the City of Los Angeles was throwing out because it was too dangerously close to a pedestrian walkway. He broke through the cement to plant it in his outdoor wood shop.

Habitat

Matias Duville (ARG)

Habitat

Jesse Reding Fleming (LA)

Most of the categories stem from Trigg’s own working methods. She had a mascot—a dusty foam sculpture—and a makeshift tool she had crafted for transporting water for her acrylic painting. Habitat was the last category to be added when Trigg found a curious example, a year into the project, that didn’t fit into her previously established themes. In New York, the artists Carol Bove and Gordon Terry had a walk-in vault that they torched and scarred while trying to break open the lock. “The example,” says Trigg, “was tied to their actual workspace and will be left there when they leave someday—it was the inspiration for the habitat category”. Trigg has a long-time curiosity about people’s unconscious actions. Artists often start the interview expressing concern that they ‘don’t really have anything’ to show her. “That happens a lot,” she says. “It cracks me up. Everyone has something, I’ve never come up dry. Through the interviewing process, things come to the surface that the artists themselves might not have been aware were part of their practice. No one has ever asked them about it before, so they are sometimes discovering it the same time I am. Those realizations are especially rewarding.” Trigg is in the process of publishing the visits on her extensive website and blog, thegoldminerproject.com, and is working towards publishing a book next year of the US-based artists in the project. -The project also links artmaking with other parts of society. ”Artists absorb the materials available around them,” notes Trigg. ”In Los Angeles, for example, even though their work might not point to film specifically, you see artists there using film production materials and reinventing how to apply them for their own purposes.” On a wider scale, Goldminer reflects on how artists relate to the world and create their own microcosm and system of object relationships. As she’s continued to work on the project, Trigg has grown more passionate about its development. ‘I hope it benefits a wide variety of people,’ she says. ‘First and foremost artists but also curators, art historians, collectors, and students. Most of all, I hope it encourages people who might not know anything about artmaking to establish their own way of developing their own personal relationship with art.’ thegoldminerproject.com Nick Smith is an actor, filmmaker and bestselling author. He lives in Miami, Florida.

Cordoba, Argentina Lives & works in Miami, FL USA

flavio GALVAN

Flavio Galvan | Tunnel | Digital Mixed Media drawing, paint, print, photography | 72 x 48 in. 2011

Argentine artist Flavio Galvan is no stranger to the technological advances propelling humanity and its understanding of science into the future at warp speed. In fact the soft-spoken 40-year old talent considers himself a bit of a polymath along the lines of the old Renaissance masters who advanced knowledge of the world around them through their art. Therefore it comes as no surprise that he lists Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Caravaggio, Tiepolo and Raphael as fonts of inspiration behind his art. And, not unlike those early masters, Galvan has pursued advanced studies in multiple disciplines before settling on a career in art. At one time or another during his professional formation, Galvan studied medicine, architecture, photography and graphic design. What surprises is that he doesn’t cite the likes of a Marshall McLuhan or today’s digital prophets as sources informing his work. He is currently executing a series of paintings that jolt the senses. These combine figurative and abstract elements to conjure a vision of the sub-atomic realm. The attention-commanding canvases explore the unseen world of the forces that shape man and the universe with uncanny results. In these he brings to bear the full scope of his studies and interests when executing his vision of contemporary society. What strikes one immediately is that he eschews the very technology propelling innovation and urging some artists to replace the paintbrush with a computer and the canvas with a 3D projector.

Not one to rely on state-of-the-art high-tech gizmos and gadgets, Galvan still manages to convey the concept of digital technology’s overarching influence on contemporary society in a distinctly innovative fashion with only a paintbrush in hand. While some might say that technology today is both a canvas and a palette, Galvan paints pictures employing traditional methods that neatly serve to close the gap between artistic output and technological input. Some would argue that traditional activities such as painting and sculpture have been radically transformed by digital techniques and media. Today entirely new forms, such as Net art, digital installation, and virtual reality, have emerged as recognized artistic practices, collected by museums, institutions, and individuals the world over. But Galvan is currently working on a series of paintings based on the science and technology fueling human imagination while straddling the divide between the contrasting practices of the distinctly traditional and radically new. In works such as Bomb and Tunnel he creates a blend of figurative and abstract elements that oscillate with palpable electric energy. Although one might confuse the striking images as being produced with digital media Galvan is not just dishing out his version of Photoshop soup. Yet both compositions fuse representational elements and mathematically inspired abstraction in a fashion reminiscent of the new visual relationships and ways of thinking made possible by the computer.Tunnel, is an image influenced by quantum physics in which a figure appears to be evaporating and what one observes in the composition are the sub atomic particles that present viewers with an uncommon glimpse of the nature of matter. In Galvan’s other canvases such as Station and Moon Walker, his figures appear even more fragmented and the surfaces erupt with patterns not unlike radio waves or digitized weather maps. These works add to the notion of a parallel, science fiction universe inspiring the imagery. Galvan says that he attempts to portray these figures of people at a subatomic level, depicting them as atoms, particles, quanta and fractals. “It’s the decomposition of the human figure into its smaller components,” he explains.

Flavio Galvan | Moon walker | Digital Mixed Media drawing, paint, print, photography | 72 x 48 in. 2011

He also says that science fiction drives his oeuvre to the extent that he constantly ponders the evolution of technology, the relationship between the micro and macro cosmos, time travel, gravity and black holes. “The paintings capture light, invisible sound, and other waves of the spectrum which surround modern man,” Galvan asserts. “Satellites, radio, television, cell phones, blue tooth, Wi-Fi, all emit millions of invisible waves that are around us and form a conjunction of different structures that are superimposed on each other,” the artist muses. “These emissions interact in a harmonious symphony that is heard in every corner of the universe,” he adds. Galvan says that he employs a diverse array of media to express his vision of life in contemporary society. “I am living in a time that technology and art complement each other,” Galvan mentions. “I use all available media: technological, artisan, electronic, digital, and traditional acrylics, oils, pencils, pastels, inks in combination with all my other traditional skills and all available technological advances,” he informs. Works such as Bomb and Agony depict people screaming in pain as weapons of mass destruction detonate around them or sitting patiently next to ticking time bombs under the shade of an umbrella. To some these works might appear as a commentary on America's wars in the Middle East or reflect a view of a dystopian society where random violence is part of everyday life. But the artist is quick to point out that he is not addressing himself to a particular conflict or issuing an indictment on any one country involved in such wars. “War is horrendous, no matter who is in it or where it is at,” intones the artist. “I make a bold statement against all wars. Nor does it represent dystopian society just errors in society that are otherwise utopian,” Galvan concludes. www.flaviogalvan.com Carlos Suarez De Jesus Art Critic

Recomended DAILY SERVING Works by Sonny Assu

Sonny Assu’s vibrant works match dark humour with political analysis in his representations of Native struggles in a context of corporate consumer culture. Assu, an artist from the Kwakwaka’wakw nation of the Pacific Northwest Coast, links the comic with pointed social critique but privileges neither in the works Coke Salish and Breakfast Series. Instead, Assu uses both to compliment and confirm the other: a gallows humour insight. The complexity of ongoing issues between Native peoples and Canadian settlers are woven into Assu’s brightly coloured, aesthetically compelling works, inferring that the subjects raised in them belong as much to a coke-drinking, cereal-eating present as to North America’s historical past. He challenges mainstream narratives of Native life and history by presenting issues of colonization, land rights, exploitation and loss of cultural heritage. This occurs in his works through a recognizable context and aesthetic language of populist consumer goods. Both his Breakfast Series and Coke Salish appropriate images and marketing from super brands like Coca-Cola, Kellogg’s and General Mills Assu points to the damaging potential of consumer values created through the wording that already exists on mainstream product packaging. The small print on the work Coke Salish encourages the public to “enjoy” Coast Salish Territory (the land where the city of Vancouver is built), which points to the literal consumption of Native land. In his Breakfast Series, Assu turns to the nutritional information on the cereal boxes re-titled Frosted Treaty Flakes and Lucky Beads.. This re-stages discussion of Native politics and reflects on the interconnections between violent histories and consumer values. The rewritten text walks the fine line between laughing and crying.

Coke-Salish | Duratrans print and Light box 24” x 35” | 2006 Courtesy of Sonny Assu and the Equinox Gallery | Photo credit: Chris Meier © Sonny Assu

Breakfast Series (left to right) Lucky Beads, Salmon Loops, Salmon Crisp and Treaty Flakes | Pigment Prints, Foam core 12” x 7” x 3” each | 2006 Courtesy of Sonny Assu and the Equinox Gallery | Photo credit: Chris Meier © Sonny Assu

Nutricional Facts per 3/4 cup (30g or 200ml) Amount Calories

30g Cereal With Milk* 120%

180%

Lies 100% 100% Deception Shiny Beads A handful Pompous, stuck up, greedy, laughing, white rich men rubbing their hands together saying “stupid indians” 100% Lucky Beads (detail) | Pigment Prints, Foam core 12” x 7” x 3” each | 2006

Lara Szabo Greisman is an independent Canadian curator based out of Stockholm. In her practice, she looks at contemporary political polemics in creative works, engaging with artistic production as a crucial voice within socio-political discussion and as an alternate form of research in human rights discourse. Szabo Greisman has worked with spaces such as Konsthall C (Stockholm), the Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver) and has held a residency at the Artel (Kingston, Canada). She is currently working with Sweden’s largest human rights conference, curating a video intervention that blurs boundaries between documentary film and video art and that problematizes narratives around “the immigrant experience” both in Scandinavia and Internationally.

Two of the works in this series, Salmon Crisp and Salmon Loops, formulate their critique through a re-figuration of the cereal boxes via a Northwest Coast stylistic lens. Assu shifts the form and representations of the animals on the covers to include ovoids and other recognizable formal carving elements. These Aboriginal Northwest Coast artistic aesthetics may be the most familiar information regarding Native peoples known and acknowledged internationally. Assu chooses to combine this more familiar visual component with consumer aesthetics, shedding light on unacknowledged or dismissed social and political actualities. His humour is more light-hearted in the works Salmon Crisp and Salmon Loops, lying not only in the transformation of the Kellogg’s toucan and the details of the Salmon Crisp bear’s eyebrows, but also in his commentary on audience expectations of the cereal boxes themselves. Assu mocks the trend of evaluating each particle eaten by assuring the cereal boxes’ reader “it’s good fat, don’t worry. Makes you smart”. Similarly, on the cover of Salmon Crisp, he comments on the frequent warning text cautioning the reader of potential exaggeration in illustrated product size. His version of the warning label: “Enlarged to show Artistic Skills”.The second two works of this series move from commentary on consumer culture to focus on specific issues and examples of exploitation within Native peoples’ histories. Lucky Beads and Frosted Treaty Flakes, while playing with the sharp contrast between subject and medium of communication, articulate the use and abuse of Aboriginal peoples systematically by government policies and trade practices.

Frosted Treaty Flakes shows the relationship between the Canadian government and nations of the Northwest coast interpreted by Assu’ rewritten nutritional information and ingredients. Further, Assusymbolically switches the GM logo on the upper left hand corner of the box to a new “brand” named after the infamous General Custer. Lucky Beads shares this same “brand”, but points more specifically to ways in which racial prejudice served as a legitimization to gift settlers with un-ceded Native land, or as phrased by Assu: a “free plot of land in every box”. Sonny Assu’s transformation of the marketing and design of a Coca-Cola sign and four breakfast cereal boxes subverts the glossy, consumer driven aesthetics of the original products. Simultaneously, it shifts them into surprising and effective vehicles that convey historical abuses as well as contemporary relations between Native and settler populations. Through his dark wit, Assu taps into the glossy psychological appeal of pre-packaged products and simultaneously symbolically references the replication of the dominant culture’s norms and denials of alternate histories through an equally glossy package. This “daily-routine” can be taken as a reproduction of constructed historical narratives that cover unflattering truths, much in the way marketing encourages identifying with a product’s branding as a means of self-definition. By critiquing both, Assu takes the joke to the next level. His version of the “part of this complete breakfast” mentality involves acknowledgment of site presented through what some say to be the most frequently read text: the back of the cereal box. Lara Szabo Greisman Independent Curator

They did so to suggest the body striking a dome shape and to evoke thoughts of first the building then the collapsing of the structure within the marked boundaries. They consequently filmed the performance shown at the 6th Street Container on a small video monitor. Beneath their film was an anamorphic floor drawing. The illustration flattened out an imaginary dome and stretched out its geometric pattern to tweak perception. The image brought to mind a piece of unfolded origami.

Dome Drift

Cristina Molina and Wes Kline have collaborated with IRREVERSIBLE creating a limited edition insert of an abstracted version of the geodesic dome...

For more than a year now Adalberto Delgado, (Little Havana’s 6th Street Container) the modest alternative space’s founder and chief curator has been organizing a steady series of edgy, cerebral shows the most recently being “Dome Drift” by Cristina Molina and Wes. The indie curator’s efforts to showcase projects typically not found in local galleries, provides a vital and thought-provoking out-of-the-ordinary option for art lovers tired of the increasingly commercial climate of Wynwood. This past September "Dome Drift," a collaborative site-specific work, transformed Delgado’s space with an economy of conceptual gestures. For their exhibit, Molina and Kline employed video, sound, an anamorphic floor drawing, and two large mesh vinyl banners outside the space to investigate the form of the dome as both emblematic of communal living and unfulfilled ideological promise. Kline, who is an artist, writer, and assistant professor of photography at the University of Florida in Gainesville, and Molina an artist who lives and works in Miami, also published a zine distributed to visitors during the opening. Both artists conveyed their interests in ideal spaces by employing the dome as an archetypical container to explore questions of intimacy, isolation, and potentiality. They used magenta duct tape to demarcate the outlines of its boundaries. The colored strips serve as a sort of Ariadne's thread, conceptually tying different segments of the Spartan show together. They also used the boundaries of the exhibition space to create their own idea of the dome. To accomplish their goals, the conceptual duo invited four specialists in their fields -- an architect, a yoga instructor, a mathematician, and an opera singer--to describe the process of building a dome in their particular disciplines. In the resulting audio piece, one can hear the singer describing creating a dome in the back of her mouth and breathing deeply for the effective transmission of sound. Her commentary overlaps with the voices of the others to create an interesting cascade of chatter resonating throughout the space. They then had four people contort themselves into an upward bow yoga pose or a full backbend within the taped-off areas.

Molina and Kline have collaborated with IRREVERSIBLE for this edition, creating a limited edition insert of an abstracted version of the geodesic dome form that has run through the body of work "Dome Drift". This image becomes a schematic which can be folded into the form of a magenta and black geodesic dome. On the back of the print is a QR code, which participants can scan into their smartphones, and it will automatically take them to the website www.domedrift.com “Where a brand new version of the video we had installed in the 6th Street Container will be available for remote viewing,” Kline explains. This video will also be available on the IRREVERSIBLE website. “Both of these 'interfaces' extend the metaphor of the drifting dome, dispersing it into both physical and virtual space,” adds Kline. In addition, the artists conducted an intervention at the IRREVERSIBLE studio, where they reconfigured elements of the work presented at the 6th Street Container. “We presented a new version of the Dome Drift video and surround sound audio, made especially for the collaboration with IRREVERSIBLE,” Kline says. “We also presented a new large scale photograph and printed text pieces, which refigure the spoken interviews as a script, again highlighting the dome as a site for potential actualization by a participant,” he mentioned. “This new work continues to approach the dome as a genealogical site, which uncovers aesthetic, historical, and political mobilities in a singular form,” concludes Kline. Commonly found throughout history, the dome appears in some of the world's most famous architecture. Thought to symbolize the celestial vault, domes typically crowned ancient temples of worship from the Pantheon in Rome, to Jerusalem's Dome of the Rock to the Hagia Sophia and St. Peter's Basilica. Buckminster Fuller, who developed the structural math for the geodesic dome, appears to be the guiding spirit informing Molina and Kline’s proposal. Fuller's geodesic domes have been deployed everywhere from military radar stations to environmental protest camps. Although Fuller's innovation never caught on with the public, it remains very much part of DIY culture with 500,000 of the domes built around the world, many of which are still in use today.

Edouard Duval-Carrié, La promenade du Grand Baron, 2010

We, at the Haitian Cultural Arts Alliance, are delighted to host and present this third installment of our Global Caribbean series: "Haiti, Kingdom of this World". It is a survey of the contemporary panorama of that nation's visual landscape and this is a departure from the regionally more inclusive program we set out to do. We feel that the disaster ensuing the devastating earthquake required a special and deserved attention to that nation. In concert with all of our partners we salute all the artists present in this exhibit, which was the first participation of Haiti at the Venice Biennial. Edouard Duval-Carrié 6

Global Caribbean III

HAITI Kingdom of this World 7

The exhibition, Haiti Kingdom of this World, arose from the need to draw up an inventory of the contemporary creativity in Haiti, and to show the work of artists who question daily the state of chaos reigning there. There are plastic artists, photographers, sculptors, painters, performers and video artists – all essential players of their time. The exhibition is conceived as a laboratory of which they are the guardians. The exhibition is mainly concerned with recent and new works commissioned from the artists specifically for this exhibition, which testify to their creative vitality. At the same time it challenges us to think about the difficulties these artists face in making their work known through travel and exchanges with the Caribbean and the rest of the world.

1. Edouard Duval-Carrié, La promenade du Grand Baron, 2010, Techniques mixtes sur aluminium, 270 x180 cm soit 106.299 x 70.8661 in. 2. Guyodo, Chaise roulante Kokobe, 2011 Mixed media, 74.0157 x 31.8897 x 63.9763 in. 3. Roberto Stephenson “Sans titre”, Haiti, the Earthquake City, 2010 4. Hervé Télémaque, La Boina del Che, 2004 Acrylic on canvas, 31.496 x 27.559 in. 5. Frankétienne, Sans titre, 2011, Techniques mixtes sur toile, 91X152 cm soit 35.8267 x 59.8425 in. Courtesy del’ Ambassadeur de France en Haïti, Monsieur Didier Lebret.

6. Jean-Hérard Celeur, Men Sigaw 2011,Techniques mixtes 76 x 38 x 28cm soit 29.9212 x14.9606 x11.0236 in. Photo by Laura Morsch 7. Paskö, Sans titre, 2010 Acrylic on canvas, 26.1811 x 26.91 inches. Digital colour print, diasec, 19.685 x 26.771 in. 8/9. Michelange Quay, Mange ceci est mon corps, 2008 Video, image and sound, 7’. 10. Pascale Monnin, Royaume de ce monde, L'ange sacrifié, 2011 Installation, mobile 23.6220 x 33.4645 x 55.1181 inches. Polyptych, mixed media, 159.055 x 97.6377 in. 11. (detail) Mario Benjamin, Makro, 2011 12 altuglas chairs, digital print, detail of the work. Photos by Laura Morsch

Haiti Kingdom of this World seeks to go to the heart of this drama, to question the idea that misfortune is inevitable and to put forward another face of Haiti as seen through the eyes of its artists. The title of the exhibition is inspired by the novel of Alejo Carpentier: it offers a way of reconsidering the founding myths linked to Haiti and, without eulogizing them, attempts to redirect the chaos of Haiti and the possibilities it may contain. Alejo Carpentier’s real maravilloso (wonderful reality) long ago gave way to “wonderful chaos”. Frankétienne, with his literary and pictorial UFOs, has been creating an apocalyptic world for about forty years now. Mario Benjamin, on the other hand, inhabits time and tames space. Maxence Denis, through his video-sculptures, pursues his reflections on the deluge of images that belong to our time. But how is it possible to continue creating after such a catastrophe and all the dramas that are added to it day by day? People like to evoke the “resilience” of the Haitian population, but if Haiti really wants to be the Phoenix rising from its ashes, it needs to take time into account.Alas, it is too long. A year after the earthquake, it is only via private initiatives that Haiti is beginning to look to the future.

For the moment, only imagination and creativity are enabling Haitians to transcend their own boundaries and reconstruct themselves little by little. Before the earthquake, Haiti did not figure on the official circuits for contemporary art; today things are even more complex. In a country occupied by humanitarian aid agencies, the devastation paradoxically betrays any attempt to construct “professional” relationships. This exhibition goes beyond such an approach and relies on this “kingdom of creativity” to be the country’s most stunning advertisement. By showing its artists to the world, Haiti hopes to transform the charity it is being offered in exchange. Despite the wide gap between the discourses stressing that Haiti will only emerge from the morass through its own culture, and the reality of the budget allocated to it, Haiti has a large concentration of artists and craftspeople from the “new region of the world”, the Caribbean – a potential which has inspired distinguished ambassadors and thinkers such as Aimé Césaire, Maryse Condé, Edouard Glissant and Graham Greene. Welcome to a Haiti which stands tall. A Haiti where life is reasserting its rights. Giscard Bouchotte Curator of the exhibition

Artists Sergine André Elodie Barthelemy Mario Benjamin Jean-Hérard Celeur Maxence Denis Edouard Duval-Carrié André Eugène Frankétienne Guyodo Sébastien Jean Killy Tessa Mars Pascale Monnin Paskö Barbara Prézeau Roberto Stephenson Hervé Télémaque Michelange Quay

12. Killy, Croix des Bossales, 2010 & 2011 Mixed: monotype on paper, small wooden boats and sculptures recycled foam

Portrait of Alejandro Gomez Arias | Oil on wood | 61.5 x 41 cm. 1928 | Private Collection | Mexico

Frida KAHLO and Alejandro GOMEZ ARIAS

Arvil Gallery Mexico

In 1922, Frida began classes at the National Prep School in Mexico City. There she met and fell in love with Alejandro Gómez Arias. For three years they were inseparable. Alex, as Frida called him, was with her on that rainy September afternoon in 1925 when the bus they were riding was struck by a trolley. Alejandro was not seriously injured and it was he who convinced the doctors at the Red Cross Hospital to attend to Frida after they had left her thinking she was too seriously injured to ever survive. Without his persistence Frida probably would have died. While recovering from the accident, Frida wrote countless letters to Alex. In her letters she complained about the pain and about being bedridden, asking him sometimes, "what is going to happen in 30 years", or "how am I going to be when I am 30".

Carta de Frida Kahlo a Alejandro Gomez Arias 30 de Junio de 1946

Private Collection | Courtesy of Arvil Gallery | Mexico

Frida Kahlo | Autorretrato con traje de terciopelo | Oil on canvas | 78 x 61 cms | 1926 Private Collection | Courtesy of Arvil Gallery | Mexico The aristocratic pose reflects Frida's interest in the paintings of the Italian Renaissance period. It was painted as a gift for her boyfriend, Alejandro, who had left her suspecting her of infidelities. Alejandro admired Italian Renaissance art and would often give Frida reproductions of Old Masters paintings. "Self-Portrait in a Velvet Dress" is Frida's interpretation of Botticelli's "Venus" which Alejandro admired. Frida began this self-portrait in the summer of 1926 and sent it to him in late September. On the back of the painting she inscribed a dedication: "For Alex. Frida Kahlo, at the age of 17, September 1926 - Coyoacan -Heute ist Immer Noch" (Today still goes on). In March of 1927, Alejandro's parents sent him on a four month tour of Europe with his uncle….mainly to separate him from Frida of whom they did not approve. By then Alejandro had also grown tired of Frida and wanted to escape from her "possessive" grip. While he was away, Frida wrote to him often to express her feelings and love for him. Alejandro was supposed to return in July but July came and went and Alejandro was still in Europe. When he finally returned in November there was a brief reconciliation with Frida but soon their relationship diminished and they drifted apart. This self-portrait was one of four paintings that Frida took to show Diego Rivera and ask his opinion of her work. After viewing the paintings, Rivera remarked that he was most interested in this self-portrait "…. because it is the most original" he said.

*Andrea Ketten

Frida painted this double portrait as a gift for her husband Diego on their 15th wedding anniversary. She later repainted another version of it to keep for herself. The dates in the title, 1929-1944, represent their years of marriage (excluding the brief period they were divorced in 1939-1940). The painting expresses Frida's love for Rivera, showing them not as a couple, but as only one person. Both halves of their faces complement each other. She merges her identity with his, creating a single head out of half of each of their faces bound together by leafless branches. In the dualistic relationship between husband and wife, reiterated in the sun and moon, the Kahlo-Rivera couple is shown to belong together. Below, the joined scallop and conch symbolize their love union.

The Mexican artist Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) is one of the most important 20th century painters, and one of the few Latin American artists to have achieved a global reputation. In 1983 her work was declared the property of the Mexican state. Kahlo's arresting pictures, most of them small format self-portraits, express the burdens that weighed upon her soul: her unbearable physical pain, the grief that Rivera's occasional affairs prompted, the sorrow her childlessness caused her, her homesickness when living abroad and her longing to feel that she had put down roots, profound loneliness. But they also declare her passionate love for her husband, her pronounced sensuousness, and her unwavering survival instinct. *

Arvil: 40 Years of Art Around the World Since the days of Dadaism to the current post-conceptualist modalities, artistic trends aimed at eradicating the artwork’s status as a commodity have emerged. However, neither non-objectual art nor art as idea or as action, intervention, or aggression have succeeded in getting round the notion that the legitimating of the work of art implies its acquisition, a process in which the art gallery plays a determinant role. Suffice it to read the credits in the catalogue for any modern or contemporary art exhibition held at a museum to realize that a great number of specialists and collectors have participated in the construction of its meaning and its situation in history, but also that its point of origin is the art gallery, since it is the gallery that is responsible for discovering, valuing, exhibiting, promoting and presenting the artist and his or her work for the consideration of the critics, which are functions that greatly exceed their mere commercialization. From 1976, Arvil organized numerous exhibitions of paintings by Frida Kahlo, and it became the mandatory intermediary for the staging of sixty domestic and international exhibitions of this artist. In 1993, “The World of Frida Kahlo: 100 works from Mexican, European and American Collections”, exhibited in Frankfurt, The Hague and Houston, was its greatest achievement, followed by the recovery, restoration and first exhibition, in 1994, of the Portrait of Alejandro Gómez Arias (1923), alongside the Self-portrait in velvet suit (1926), which Kahlo had always wished would be shown together. “Image of Mexico, Mexico’s contribution to the art of the 20th century”, featuring 300 works by Mexican artists, from José María Velasco to muralism and the work of the youngest painters of that time, shown in Frankfurt, Vienna and Dallas in 1987; “Diego Rivera, a retrospective”, at The Detroit Institute of Arts, Michigan, U.S.A., 1986; “Latin American Masters in Mexican Collections”, featuring 55 works by Torres García, Botero, Lam and Mérida, 1995; “Siqueiros/ Pollock-Pollock/ Siqueiros”, held in Dusseldorf, Germany, 1995; “Images and Visions, Mexican Art from the Avant-garde to the Present”, 1995, comprising 138 works (Tamayo, Mérida, Rojo, Gironella, Toledo, Nieto, Maldonado, Venegas, Galán, Zenil, among others), at the Würth Art Museum, Künzelsau, Germany, and at the Contemporary Art Center in Galicia, Spain, are some of the exhibitions which would have been impossible without the gallery’s intervention. Armando Colina and Víctor Acuña’s constant activity at the head of Arvil Gallery has not only reavealed their capacity to overcome economic crises and the ups and downs of the art market during those periods, but also their determination, which is above any economic interest, to take twentieth-century Mexican art to the most important museums in the world. Its wide vision of contemporary artistic phenomena and its constant support to institutional art projects render Arvil Gallery a perfect example of the way to repay the country through the generation of a private cultural structure aimed at supporting institutions that legitimize art. And on this occasion, the recognition for their work received by Armando Colina and Víctor Acuña from the National Institute of Fine Arts goes beyond their brilliant career as gallerists: it constitutes an acknowledgment of their love for Mexican art and their contribution to its dissemination at the global level.

Luis Carlos Emerich (Culiacán, Sin., 1939) He studied Architecture at the National Autonomous University of Mexico- UNAM. From 1963 to the present he has devoted himself to visual arts criticism. His texts have been published in multiple cataloges, magazines and cultural suplements, both local and forein. Of the 12 books he has published, the most recent ones are: Rostros y tradiciones en la coleccion de arte ING (ING, Mexico 2005), Vlady, Libreat de apuntes (FCE- ARvil, Mexco, 2006) and Las edades de Saturnino Herrán (Instituto Cultural de Aguascalientes, Mexico, 2007. Second Edition, 2010)

*Andrea Kettenmann | Frida Kahlo 1907-1954 Pain and Passion | TASCHEN

1. Mona Hatoum, Hot Spot, 2006. Stainless steel and neon tube, 92 1/8 x diameter: 87 13/16 in. Photo: Stephen White Courtesy White Cube 2. Abigail Fallis, Holy Mackerel, Sterling silver ruby red neon and vanity case, series of 6. Photo: Pangolin London/Steve Russell 3. Abigail Fallis, With Strings Attached, Mixed media, Unique . Photo: Pangolin London/Steve Russell

Sculpted by Women Kristin Hjellegjerde “I am not what I am, I am what I do with my hands.” Louise Bourgeois If you were asked to name Women amongst the legendary artists that work with the art form sculpture, you might find yourself struggling. One might think of Barbara Hepworth, Louise Bourgeoise, Louise Nevelson, Eva Hesse and Lee Bontecou, and then it sort of fades out. Lately the representation has not been any better, with very little visibility of Female artists at the Royal Academy of Arts at “The Modern British Sculpture” exhibit. Even more disappointing was the lack of Women at the Saatchi’s exhibit this summer “The Shape of things to come”. With this it does not mean that we are lacking in Women in the field but rather lacking in hearing about them. This is why the exhibit at the Pangolin Gallery in London earlier this year called “Women make Sculpture” was and is so important. A lot of Women do not want to be put in this box of Male work and Female work but the importance here is the awareness of the diversity and creativity of Women’s Sculpture today. The Director of Pangolin London, Polly Bielecka, notes: “The exhibition is not intended to tackle gender superiority; rather it hopes to question whether female artists bring something different t o contemporary British sculpture.”

Bharti KHER "The night she left", 2011. Wooden stair, fabric, resin, bindis 226 x 91 x 280 cm. Unique. Courtesy Galerie Perrotin, Paris

There are plenty of Women out there though right now that can knock you out with their talent, some of them are Eva Rotchschild, Rachel Whiteread, Sarah Lucas, Tracey Emin, Lynda Benglis, Rachel Feinstein, Kiki Smith and Yayoi Kusama. Other admirable names to keep in mind for the future are Abigail Fallis and Polly Morgan who both had pieces at the Pangolin exhibit, and Bahrti Kher and Mona Hatoum. There is no exclusion to the range of materials these Women are working with; daringly each artist has their own tangible style and identifiable invention.

Polly Morgan, Communion, Taxidermy glass silver silk and enamel, Unique. Photo: Pangolin London/Steve Russell

Mona Hatoum who was born in Beirut, and who now lives and works in London and Berlin creates work using a variety of materials like electric light bulbs, wool, grass or steel, sometimes enlarging every day objects to turn them into humorous, thought provoking or threatening sculptures. At other times her work can be surrealistic or even political, like with the installation Hot Spot (2006). Mona Hatoum was recently awarded the prestigious Joan Miro prize and will hold a solo exhibition of her work in Barcelona at the Joan Miro Foundation in June of next year. Abigail Fallis studied at Camberwell college of Arts, where she learned silversmithing and metal works; she makes use of a wide range of materials from recycled plastic baby dummies, trolleys and papier-mâché. One of her motivations is to give a humoristic but meaningful message about consumerism and genetics. There is also a great deal of passionate sexuality in Abigail Fallis work. Bahrti Kher, who is very well known in India where she also lives and works (though born in London to Indian parents), incorporates Indian female symbols into her art like bindis (semen shaped…). Myths, fables and magic, play an important part in her sculptures. With the “Leave your smell¨ exhibit earlier this year at the Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin (Paris) Bahrti Kher brings Indian folklore together poetically with classical objects. Next year she will have two solo Exhibitions, one at Hauser & Wirth, New York and the other at Parasol Unit, London. Polly Morgan is a young London based taxidermist, her interest in animals especially birds in unexpected scenery has rapidly drawn attention from the art world and given her raving reviews. Taxidermy that used to be more common among an “older” generation has now turned into a more popular medium to work with. Polly Morgan was discovered by the artist Banksy and is now the hot thing to collect among celebrities from Saatchi to Kate Moss and Courtney Love. With her morbid craft she manages to touch us with the depth and soul of her object.

Bharti KHER "Make up (as you go along)", 2010. Wood, mirror, bindis, glass bricks 172 x 130 x 71 cm Unique. Courtesy Galerie Perrotin, Paris

With more space to present, these knockouts could be easier seen and shake up the sphere to bring in some new light.

Kristin Hjellegjerde studied Theatre, and Art Business in New York and has a Bachelor degree in Literature from Oslo University. She has worked as a performance artist, actress and model (Bangkok, Singapore, L.A. and N.Y.). Now Kristin dedicates herself to Art. She currently works as an Art Advisor in London and writes for the blog ArtEcoNY.

Aida Tejada

Series Who Are You ? The Mirror, 2010 | Image capture using natural reflections on glass and body in slow motion

In today’s world of instant gratification and software that creates images that seem much more complex than they really are, Aida Tejada comes up with a retort to the software virtuosos. Her vision articulates the effects of light and how it is captured in ways that render her subjects through time and space, not Photoshop. Her camera is a means of transport from the everyday to the interior of the soul. She uses the shutter like a paintbrush and color and light emerge as the objects of her gaze. The fact that Tejada has earned degrees in psychology and communication, and not photography, adds intrigue to the substance of her visual vocabulary. She routinely signs up for workshops to add to her already intuitive knowledge of photography. Tejada’s passion is for learning how to expand her visual vocabulary, a mission that will never end. Much of Tejada’s workshop experience has focused on the need to acquire technical skill. At The International Center of Photography she worked with Bryan Peterson, a wonderful ‘how to’ author and teacher. With Peterson she plumbs the left-brained science of how photography works, and then takes her studies to the opposite end of the spectrum by working with Bonny Lhotka. Lhotka is the doyenne of contemporary digital printmaking and her books, Horizons: Altered Reality and Digital Alchemy are seductive invitations to artists like Tejada to take their work into the realm of contemporary printmaking. Lhotka has been a seminal force for pushing the envelope of digital photography into installation, sculpture and the singular image. While psychology and photography may define the perimeter of Tejada’s work, at heart she is a poet. She practices a form of magical realism that explores the edges of vision, but remains grounded by the camera itself. In seeking alternatives to reality Tejada makes the subject irrelevant. She transforms the ordinary into an aesthetic statement and nothing escapes her practiced eye. She walks the world with a heightened sense of emotion and empathy, creating poetic narratives with reflections, textures and movements. It is altogether a sophisticated vision and the eye of the child. Everything is fresh and new as her camera apprehends a jaded world and quotidian objects come under Tejada’s spell.

Visible Magic Lynne Bentley-Kemp, PhD

Series Around Me, 2010 | Image capture using natural reflections on glass and body in slow motion

The composition of these photographs is done "in-camera," not through composite layers resulting from computer-generated editing Aida Tejada

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Series Waiting For Aquella Mujer, 2011 Image capture using natural reflections on glass and body in slow motion

A resident of Cudjoe Key, Florida and a Photography Instructor with the Department of Visual Art and Art History at Florida Atlantic University, Lynne Bentley-Kemp has had a longstanding relationship with photography and its impact upon visual literacy. Much of her involvement with the visual world has been grounded in the social and historical influences of photography. Interested in studying the impact photography has had on culture, Lynne entered the Ph.D. program in Comparative Studies at Florida Atlantic University in 1999 as a member of its inaugural class. Her beautifully illustrated dissertation “Recovering Eden: The Photographer in the Garden” analyzed the work of six photographers who possessed a special sensitivity to the American landscape. Since earning her PhD in 2003, Lynne has been actively advocating for the arts close to her home in Key West, Florida. Her activities have included membership on two arts related Boards, Sculpture Key West and the Studios of Key West. She has lectured, curated exhibitions and written about art for local publications and organizations

Handwork and craft are important elements in Tejada’s approach to ‘slow art’. The work, though emphatically not post processed through a computer, is the result of special effects. In a series that evokes the intersection of ancient pictographs and contemporary graffiti, Tejada utilizes a thick sandwich of acrylic and string to make a filter that is placed in front of the camera’s lens. Her understanding of the devices of depth of field and hyper focal distance enhances the transparent layering of the image elements. She then fuses the final image onto a variety of substrates - paper, aluminum, acrylic - through an image transfer process. Her restrained use of craft enhances the originality of the work. Some of the most successful images are contained in the three series titled, ”Reflexion”, “The Window” and “Remainder”. The photographs create ambiguous suggestions of paint, graphite and other markings that might be parts of a universal history of humanity. They are like markings on a cave wall, part of the palimpsest of narratives made by humans since the beginning of recorded time. In exploring alternatives to reality, Tejada bumps up against the foundations of our existence. Do we see with our eyes or do we ‘see’ with our emotions? In all likelihood a true revelation of our world arrives with both the physical and the emotional. Tejada demonstrates that as fact. Her compositions elicit, in her words, “the footprint of our existence” as all pretense is stripped away to reveal the manifestation of spirit. With Tejada’s energy and openness for trying out new ideas she ensures the sustainability of her art. Her developmental approach to questioning and creating is the heart of her authenticity. She imbeds her expansive cultural literacy into each image and makes it altogether unique and familiar. For her and her viewer, the work is completely liberating for the mind and the eye.

Lynne Bentley-Kemp, PhD Instructor, Dept of Art and Art History Florida Atlantic University

Series Inner Reflections and Around Me, 2011 | Image capture using natural reflections on glass and body in slow motion

Jorge Hulian A Passion For Collecting

Oswaldo Subero | Espacios Negros # 856 | 50 cm x 50 cm | Acrylic on canvas | 2000

Janet Batet

There are numerous ways of approaching the world of collecting. Sometimes it is the desire of a secure investment what leads many people into the art world. Other times, however, the motivation is more philanthropic and the collector seeks to conciliate his interest in art and the desire to disseminate culture as a common good, making art accessible to everyone. In the case of Jorge Hulian, the reasons leading him into the world of art are very personal. As a child, all that was related to creation always fascinated him. The incursions at a very early age in the world of painting are remembered by Hulian with great fondness. However, Hulian’s grand parents does not consider artist's career is a viable option. Thus, Jorge Hulian leaves the path of creation to surrender to business management. However, the deep-rooted sensitivity towards art never disappeared, coming back -transfigured- in the desire for collecting that has accompanied Hulian since the tender age of seventeen. Since then, the passion for creation and, moreover, the passion for the human behind the oeuvre, has seconded Hulian throughout every step of his life; becoming art a very faithful companion. A major Modern Venezuelan Master teach Hulian the passion for pure painting, devoid of any naturalistic reference. Subero is the master who wakes up in Hulian this devotion for light and color in contemporary art. To the natural pleasure for more traditional figurative art, is added the trained eye, able to enjoy the purely pictorial. It is not accidental if the early works in the collection, are those of Oswaldo Subero, who besides a great friend and guide to Hulian, is a beacon in the Venezuelan optical art. Although in his early years Subero is interested in the abstract informalism and constructivism, what distinguish his contribution to the art world are his optical painting where light, volume and color make unique mosaics. Hulian has amazing masterpieces. Suffice it to name a few of them: Pintura Bidimensional (Bidimensional Painting), and Degradación del Color, Líneas y Figuras en Espacios Negros (Degradation of Color, lines and figures in black spaces). Between the other Venezuelans included in the collection highlight the names of Luis Brito, Tulio Diaz, Carlos Baez, Jonidel Medoza, Henry Bermudez, Alejandra Villasmil, and Luis Brito. When Hulian moved to Miami in 1998, the collection grow and widen their horizons to Latin American art and contemporary art. New figures, relevant to the new context, are added. Between them, Charo Oquet, Pablo Soria, and Chenco, Jose Maria Mijares, Alejandro Mendoza, Kcho and Nancy Brown, among other. Once in Miami, the passion for art became to Hulian the most effective way to stay connected to his cultural roots and his personal history. The works that Hulian carries with him from Caracas, become a powerful amulet or talisman that ties him to his homeland. they become as well a unique magic bridge, leading the collector back to the individual who produced them. In this sense, Hulian establishes a very personal relationship with the artist, by creating a solid bond that persists beyond the mere acquisition of a work of art. That explains why delve into the works that make up this singular collection is like a compass, an ultimate beat: a sort of biography of Jorge Hulian himself.

artdealermiami

Oswaldo Subero | Degradacion del Color # 909 | Triptico 70 cm x 180 cm | Acrylico on canvas | 2003

1528 alton road miami beach fl 33139 USA ph: 305-532-0609 www.artdealermiami.com

d A 9 m

Cordoba, Argentina Lives & works in Miami, FL USA

raúl MAGALDI Executed with an economy of line, subtle traces of diffuse color, an architect’s precision and a profusion of details, Raul Magaldi’s striking drawings evince a sharp aesthetic, a keen eye for composition and a uniquely personal stamp in capturing the nuances of active living in contemporary society. The quality of his drawings is enviable and stem from a rigorous order acquired through a long career as an architect and artist during which his practice has encompassed various disciplines. Magaldi was born in Argentina, where he graduated as an Architect from the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism at the University of Cordoba in 1969. It was in an era when urban planning, architecture, interior, landscape, industrial and graphic design where all combined as part of a thorough curriculum. It was there he developed his mastery of structure, spaces and form. At the time Magaldi studied under leading figures such as Cesar Peli and Tomas Maldonado, later director of the Bauhaus during the 1970’s and 1980’s. Consequently he served as a professor of drawing and architecture at his alma mater, before taking charge of the design program at the Catholic University of Cordoba. Soon after opening his own architectural firm in his native city, Magaldi went on to design and build multi-family apartment dwellings in Cordoba among other projects. He was hired to work with O’Kelly, Mendez and Brunner in Puerto Rico where he was in charge of the remodeling project at the San Juan Airport and various industrial complex developments. Magaldi also participated in the production of “Step Away,” a documentary of 1979 Pan American Games narrated by Orson Welles and Ricardo Montalban.

Help | Pen and Ink Drawing | 2011

Driving under the moon | Pen and Ink Drawing | 2011

As a young man, Magaldi spent six months living and traveling among the indigenous populations of South America. Navigating the Amazon by canoe, he studied the habitats of the Yagua and Pirua peoples. The experience earned him a life-long appreciation and deeper understanding of their ritual art, craftsmanship and culture. Another voyage that would mark him later on in life was his sojourn through Italy with his compatriot, artist Flavio Galvan, including stops in Rome, Florence, Pisa, Siena, San Gimignano and Milan, where Magaldi immersed himself in the rich tradition of the Renaissance. Sitting with Magaldi in his studio, listening the humble man share his recollections of a vast and fruitful career, we can’t help but draw comparisons to “The Most Interesting Man in the World” from the Dos XX’s commercial. Blessed with an insatiable curiosity for materials, Magaldi also carved a reputation for his work with etched glass. He explains that the nature of his attraction to the medium stems from his longing to connect with the minimal and subtle and to incorporate art into architecture in which art participates as a protagonist with a spatial scene through the fluid function of line and expression. Magaldi went on to study painting with Argentine masters and had his first solo exhibit at Galeria Lagard in Buenos Aires in 1990. His success led the gallery to represent him during the decade and he went on to become one of Lagard’s featured artists at the prestigious Latin American arteBa Art Fair one year. In short order he was invited to exhibit his work at the Maldonado Museum in Punta del Este, Uruguay and his paintings have since been integrated into private collections from across the hemisphere and as far away as Morocco. The remarkable talent explains that his work narrates his life in a perfect counter balance to his experiences. He stops to ponder and clarifies that as a Latin who grew up in a society steeped in a history of dictatorships, revolution and repression his focus hews to the pursuit of liberty, the universal, the enduring and essential. For Magaldi, his interior world is one profound with intimate and familiar scenes, a deep respect for quotidian life, for the grandeur of small things. Taking a deep breath to pause, Magaldi cites Beltran Russell, Kandinsky and his colleagues Frank Gehry and Walter Gropius as major influences. And not unlike these influential thinkers, one can’t help but consider, that in his own modest way, Raul Magaldi is leaving deep footprints on the consciousness of those whose paths he’s crossing. Carlos Suarez De Jesus Art Critic

Tree of life | Pen and Ink Drawing | 2011

New

carlos Felix

The use of skill and imagination

IRREVERSIBLE project room

Mexico, Lives & works in Miami, FL

ARTIST, PAINTER OR WHAT?. ART has not always been what we think it is today. When you refer to yourself or talk about your work, do you call yourself a painter or an artist? Does it vary depending on who you are talking to, or are you using a label of any kind? Today the questions What is Art? and What is to be an Artist? Are not easily answered. According to William Rubin, director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, "there is no single definition of art." the same position goes to Robert Rosenblum art historian he stated that "the idea of defining art is so small [today]" that he does not think "anyone would dare to do it." and Thomas McEvilley agrees that today "more or less anything can be designated as art." Why do we make art? That is the basic Greater Good question. Is for fun and excitement; building bridges between himself and the rest of humanity; reuniting and recording fragments of thought, feeling, and memory; and saying things that he can not state in any other way? All answers are deeply personal. IRREVERSIBLE project room is exploring the possible cognitive and emotional benefits of the arts, and yet gives the artist the opportunity to evoke a more fundamental benefit: The benefit of doing what they feel they are born to do! Since art lacks a satisfactory definition, it is easier to describe it as the way something is done -- "the use of skill and imagination in the creation of aesthetic objects, environments, or experiences that can be shared with others" rather than what it is. IRREVERSIBLE project room is a new segment introducing emerging artists of every age, background and color to our readers and international arts scene. The point is to gain a deeper understanding of them as individuals rather than boxing them into the traditional role of being marketed as creative types on the proverbial auction block. We want to discover how they think; who they are. In short our goal is not only to focus on what participants create in their studios but what makes them attractive as well rounded people contributing to the world at large instead. Carlos Felix is represented by artdealermiami.

Photography & Art Direction Natasha Kertes Couture Collar Design Tia Gugliotta Videographer Albert Manduca

NEO POP ART MARTIN KAUPP MIAMI

40 X 41 IN. MIXED MEDIA CANVAS PRINT ON WOOD ACRYLIC PAINT | PRECIOUS STONES

www.martinkaupp.com kauppart@gmail.com

Nino Rizzo | Oltre i Binari | 2010-11 | Digital Photography

Peru Lucia Reategui Carlo Vitalino Rudolph Castro Iris Diaz Cecilia Carrion Rossana Lopez Guerra Hugo Vasquez Andrea Elera

1- Lucia Reategui

2- Carlo Vitalino

3- Andrea Elera

Italy Antonino Busa Laura Zarrelli Nino Rizzo Rubin Koldashi

LAIQART Peru | Italy Rossana Lopez Guerra | “Hilomorfismo series 2” Photo assembly | 67 cm x 67cm | 2010

Iris Diaz | Hacha-Casa, Casa de paloma, hacha y tronco (Ax-house, bird house, ax and log) | assembly Various measurements | 2011

Rudolph Castro | Cuatro proyectiles (Four missiles) pencil and charcoal drawing on vinyl paper | 44.5 cm x 56 cm | 2009

Laura Zarrelli | 2011 | Digital Photography

LAIQART Peru | Italy Antonino Busa’ | Aldiqua | 2010, Digital Photography

Laiqart was launched and is supported by the following: Melissa Arenas, founding managing director based in Lima-Peru; she holds a B.A. in Science of Management (Sup De Co Montpellier-France), Day Ines Mendoza, director and curator based in Venice-Italy, art restorer (Paintings and woodworks) I.S.A de Gubbio (Perugia-Italy) B.A. Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia in Arti Visive sezione Pittura, and Master of graphic arts, Javier Veliz, Art Director based in Lima-Peru, Carolina Casusol, visual artist based in Lima-Peru and Daniel Paz, visual artist and curator based in Buenos AiresArgentina. The Laiqart international artist exchange group aims at establishing relationships and networking opportunities between emerging artists and art professionals promoting cultural and art exchanges nationally and internationally. The group’s principal focus is for participants to explore and contribute to the arts among communities initiatives all over the world. Thirteen artists were chosen to promote their works with IRREVERSIBLE during Art Basel Miami Week and Satellite fairs USA December 2011

Hugo Vasquez | “Sociedad 2007- 2009” (“Society 2007-2009”) | Digital photo printed on cotton paper, 120 cm x 80 cm

“Laiqa means wizard in Quechua, someone who attracts, enchants and captive because of its good qualities. Laiqart is the magic inside art because we believe artists are magicians that delight us with their creations. They have incredible powers and employ all the energy of the universe in order to bring to us fascinating wonders hidden to the eyes” Melissa Arenas Founder Curator

Rubin Koldashi | Notti Insonne | Mixed media | 2011

Cecilia Carrion | Intermitencias | Digital collage various measurements | 2011

e 1

Burning Man is a week-long annual event held in the Black Rock Desert in northern Nevada, in the United States. The event starts on the Monday before the American Labor Day holiday (Labor Day is a United States federal holiday observed on the first Monday in the month of September), and ends on the holiday itself. It takes its name from the ritual burning of a large wooden effigy* on Saturday evening. The event is described by many participants as a temporary metropolis dedicated to community, art, self-expression, and self-reliance. The community depart one week later, having left no trace whatsoever.

Living in a free world Tomas Loewy photography

Burning Man

* An effigy is a representation of a person, especially in the form of sculpture or some other three-dimensional form. The term is usually associated with full-length figures of a deceased person depicted in stone or wood on church monuments. These most often lie supine with hands together in prayer, but may also be recumbent, kneeling in prayer or even standing. An effigy can also be a doll burned in order to dispel undesired spirits or to advocate against a person. The burning is meant as a sign of the participants' shared intent to banish the represented element from their lives.

The Temple | In addition to the burning of the Man, the burning of a Temple has become an activity at the event

The Burning Man event is governed by 10 principles, which are radical inclusion, gifting, decommodification, radical self-reliance, radical self-expression, communal effort, civic responsibility, leaving no trace, participation, and immediacy. • Radical inclusion | Anyone who can afford a ticket is gladly welcomed and there are no prerequisites to be part of Burning Man • Gifting | Instead of cash, event participants are encouraged to rely on a gift economy, a sort of potlatch. Burners are encouraged to give gifts to one another unconditionally. • Decommodification | No cash transactions are permitted between attendees of the event, which is in accordance with the principles of Burning Man. Cash can be used for a select few charity, fuel and sanitation vendors • Radical self-reliance | Because of the event's harsh environment and remote location, participants are expected to be responsible for their own survival supplies. Since Buning man forbids any commerce, participants must be prepared and bring all their own supplies with the exception of the items stated in Decommodification. • Radical self-expression | Participants are encouraged to express themselves in a number of ways through various art forms and projects. The event is clothing-optional and public nudity is common, though not practiced by the majority. • Communal effort | Participants are encouraged to work with and help fellow participants. • Civic responsibility | Participants are encouraged to assume responsibility and be part of a civil society in which federal, state and local laws are obeyed and communicate this to other participants. • "Leave No Trace" | Participants are committed to a "leave no trace" event. They strive to leave the area around them in better condition than before their arrival to ensure that their participation does not have a long-term impact on the environment. • Participation | Burning Man is about participation. • Immediacy | Participants are encouraged to become part of the event, to experience who and what is around them and to explore their inner selves and their relation to the event

Bicycles and tricycles are extremely popular for getting around on the dry lake. Mountain bikes are generally preferred over road bikes for riding on the dried silt, which is normally hard but becomes loose with traffic. Participants often decorate their bikes to make them unique. Mutant Vehicles, often motorized, are purpose-built or creatively altered cars and trucks. Participants who wish to bring motorized mutant vehicles must submit their designs in advance to the event's own DMV or "Department of Mutant Vehicles” for approval and for physical inspection at the time of the event. Not all designs and proposals are accepted.

Oblique aerial photo of Black Rock City showing the familiar "C" or semicircle pattern Message out of the Future, by a Belgian collective known as Uchronia 2006 | The project raised the bar for large-scale art on the playa both in terms of scale and community. The structure was made entirely of 2" x 3" wood nailed together in a seemingly random pattern. The completed piece measured approximately 180' in length and 50' in height. Its cavernous interior space was accessed by three entrances and was the site of nightly dance parties. Jan Kriekels, Uchronia's founder, funded the entire project with income from his radiator company. Many of his employees used their annual vacation time to participate in the project. Eighty crew members flew to the United States from Belgium, built a communal camp, and labored on the installation. Jan's philosophy is that any group of creative individuals can benefit greatly by living and working together, building community through art-making. This ethos, of course, dovetailed beautifully with the Burning Man Project's ethos. Message was designed by Belgian artist Arne Quinze.

“Burning man gives you a sensation of liberation. Freedom that comes from the expanse of open space, open minds and hearts to heights seldom found outside of Black Rock Desert, the vast, high altitude land in northern Nevada. People at Burning Man open up, ooze potential, express and face previously untapped talents, agendas, passions, and fears. The heat during the day fosters easy exhibitionism the cold nights allow Burners to dress up in myriad expressive ways. A city of over 50,000 unencumbered people fosters an unavoidable inspiration in each one of them. On a personal level, the diversity of the theme camps shows layers upon layers of pragmatism, communal coexistence, thriving creativity, combined with the thrill of interpersonal relationships”. Tomas Loewy

for more info please visit Radical Burning Desert - 7 years of Burning Man Photography www.tomasloewy.com

NatashaKertes photography

www.natashakertes.com

Taxi | Mixed media, digital print on canvas | 2007

martin KAUPP

If Cuba has become a museum for old American cars, then Martin Kaupp has become the pop-art documentarian of the vintage automobiles that rule the island’s roadways. The German artist’s mixed media works typically depict one of the estimated 60,000 classic vehicles that existed in Cuba prior to the time of the 1959 revolution and that art directors love using on book covers today to evoke feelings of melancholy. After the American embargo was placed on the island half a century ago and Detroit auto manufacturers were forced to stop sending cars to the island, the classic Fords, Dodges and Chryslers transformed into objects of nostalgia over the decades. Often movies about Cuba like "Buena Vista Social Club" turn the jalopies into objects of wistfulness for a bygone era. In these flicks you see beautifully styled jalopies with long low bodies, swept back fender lines, dual headlights and exceptionally flat hoods cruising Old Havana streets not unlike a rolling piece of sculpture. Due to the embargo and limited buying power of the economic situation under communism, Cubans have held onto the vintage automobiles by necessity.

Pre-1959 cars are the standard, rather than an exception from Havana to Oriente and the cars are generally referred to as yank tanks or cacharros and often used as taxis. Kaupp has created an arresting series featuring the classic automobiles that once inspired Cuban crooner Carlos Varela to use these cars a metaphor for the 1959 revolution. His song "La Política no Cabe en la Azucarera" mused about a friend’s ’59 Chevy that stopped running and he couldn’t find the spare parts to get it moving again. Today, the island’s authorities capitalize off the nostalgia foreigners are overcome by when they first visit Cuba. Government agencies rent visitors streamlined old convertibles for them to navigate Old Havana’s streets and coastline with the sensation they are experiencing a living museum. Kaupp’s work is particularly suited for conveying the sense of a city trapped in time. He employs photography, painting and digital effects to produce sparkling images of old clunkers, the faces of strangers, rusting architecture and crumbling curbs that combine in a rhapsody of color within la Habana Vieja and its murky borders.

Malecon | Mixed media, digital print on canvas

In one of his images the light sweeps lowly and the night is fringed with rain as thunderclaps tear the sky. A blue coupe is outlined against a palatial building where people peek out from balconies to observe the tempest. The image insinuates itself ineffably in the psyche as the light is caught on the surfaces of the space between the vehicle, the building, the sky and the street. In this and other scenes, Kaupp’s sympathy for recording and, more importantly, for magnifying the ordinary scenes that comprise the fabric of daily experience, are brought to the surface. Kaupp, who studied art in Germany and traveled the world extensively as a photographer, lived in Cuba for over a decade. He transforms the images of the cars into compositions of crystalline architectonic elements. The polished chrome surfaces, viewed against a neutral background, gleam; painterly radiance applied to his photos belies a life of indifference and abuse. Kaupp’s scrutinized hyper-real textures and reflections carry myriad richly orchestrated abstractions that produce luxurious pictorial, as well as sensory, illusions. One of his attention-grabbing images depicts a scene of a bustling Havana street observed from behind the dashboard of lovingly restored Oldsmobile sedan. The piece hums with velvety aqua, mimosa orange and buttery sunflower hues, betraying the frigid technical nature often associated with digital prints. Kaupp further fuses lavishly complex tones in a picture snapped in front of Havana’s famous Malecon. Here the artist captures a ’57 Mercury station wagon, painted a deep-lavender color, parked near the shoreline as crashing waves from the ocean splash the vehicle in a mist of spray. A man and a young woman appear in the forefront enjoying an afternoon date. Yet another striking image isolates a hulking red Dodge against a dilapidated building in a nighttime scene executed in warm, silky pastels that glow under a canopy of moonlight azure. The image seems to fluidly reflect Kaupp’s meditation on life in Cuba.

Chevy 55 | Mixed media, digital print on canvas | 2005

Payret | Mixed media, digital print on canvas | 2005

Schoolgirl | Mixed media, digital print on canvas | 2007

Pforzheim, Germany Lives & works in Miami, FL USA

His portraits of old cars, buildings and the people of Cuba reflect the mobile, freewheeling quality of a life-style one doesn’t normally associate with a repressive regime. In the United States, if you don't like the place you are in, then there's always a highway that beckons you to go somewhere else. But in Kaupp’s pictures the overarching sense of melancholy and wanderlust for a better way of life also seems tempered with a healthy dose of optimism. Engaging his works, absorbing his enthusiastic passion for Cuba’s surfeit of old cars, the inhabitant’s enduring love affair with them and the notion of the island itself as a living museum, it becomes obvious that the artist is fascinated by the way in which light magically sanctifies what would otherwise be banal visual events. In short, Kaupp’s photos succeed deftly in transporting viewers into an era that remains trapped not unlike and insect in amber in bitter times while yet hinting at better ones to come. By Carlos Suarez De Jesus www.mar tinkaupp.com

Repetition | Mixed media, digital print on canvas | 2007

Streets | Mixed media, digital print on canvas | 2003

The Museum of Fine Arts | Houston (MFAH)

Cover for the journal Azulejos (Mexico City), vol. I, no. 2 (September, 1921). Coll. Instituto de Investigaciones Bibliográficas: Biblioteca Nacional | Hemeroteca Nacional, Mexico City

In January 2012 The MFAH and ICAA will launch a digital archive of some 10,000 primary-source materials, culled by hundreds of researchers based in 16 cities in the U.S. and throughout Latin America

Gyula Kosice | Cover for Groupe argentin Art Madi International Argentinean Group Art Madí International | exh. cat. (Paris: Galerie Denise René), 1958 | Collection of Gyula Kosice, Buenos Aires

10th Anniversary of Latin American Initiatives at The Museum of Fine Arts Houston (MFAH) are a catalyst for the future of the field of 20th-century Latin American and Latino Art. Some 10,000 primary-source documents will be available worldwide for the first time, launching with materials from Mexico, Argentina and the American Midwest Houston—July 2011— The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and its research institute, the International Center for the Arts of the Americas (ICAA), have devoted ten years and $50 million to initiatives in 20th-century Latin American and Latino art. In January 2012, the MFAH and ICAA will launch a digital archive of some 10,000 primary-source materials, culled by hundreds of researchers based in 16 cities in the U.S. and throughout Latin America. The online archive will be available worldwide, free of charge, and is intended as a catalyst for the future of a field that has been notoriously lacking in accessible resources. The phased, multi-year launch begins with 2,500 documents from Argentina, Mexico and the American Midwest, capping the 10th-anniversary year for the Latin American program. Documents from other countries and communities will continue to be uploaded and made available. The first volume in a companion series of 13 annotated books will be published with the archive launch, with subsequent volumes in the series published annually.

The online archive is rich in artists’ writings, correspondence and other unpublished materials, as well as in texts published in newspapers and period journals by artists, critics, scholars and others who have played a vital role in shaping the cultural fabric of the countries and communities where the Documents Project has had a presence. The material brings to life the ferment of international cultures, ideas and personalities that swept across 20th-century South America, the Spanish-speaking Caribbean and Latino communities in the United States as artists, writers and intellectuals sought to define or challenge notions of a national art; art movements emerged in response to changing local political regimes, as well as to what was perceived as the onslaught of North American culture; and the contribution of Latin American artists to the early stages of global avant-garde movements. The archive also highlights the common interests and affinities shared by Latin artists working in North and South America, allowing for first-hand comparative studies of these broad-based, highly heterogeneous groups. Documents from Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Peru, Puerto Rico, Venezuela and the United States will continue to be added to the website over the next three years, with the entire selection of holdings to date available by 2015. As the ICAA research initiatives progress, the website will continue to develop in perpetuity, making it an indispensable provider of Latin American and Latino primary-source documents.

(Right) Kenneth Kemble, “Para aquellos a quienes esta exposición pueda sorprender…” (To those of whom this exhibition may surprise…), in Kemble, exh. cat. (Buenos Aires: Galería Pizarro), 1961. Courtesy of the Private Archives of Julieta Kemble, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

(Left) Page from the document “Cry for Justice” that includes the statement “ To listen and to act,” issued by the Civil Rights Department of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America (AFL / CIO) as well as the collective essay, “Museum of the streets.” This page depicts details from several Chicago street murals including the one of the crucified Puerto Rican freedom fighter Pedro Albizu Campos on the left. Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen of North America under the direction of its Civil Rights Department AFL/CIO, 1972. Courtesy of the United Food and Commercial Workers, International Union (Center) Luis Felipe Noé, “Presentación de mi obra a un amigo” (Introduction of my work to a friend), in Noé, exh. cat. (Buenos Aires: Galería Van Riel), 1960

ELBISREVERRI TM

An International Art Project

Presents

Founder Artist | Alejandro Mendoza - Project Director | Norelkys Blazekovic 2 2 - summit | noor@giantsinthecity.com

Paula Urbano (SWE) - Sandra Garcia (COL) - Martin Kaupp (GER) - Otton Castañeda (MX) - Bartus Bartolomes. (FR-VZLA) Edouard Duval- Carrie (FR-HT) - Astolfo Funes (VNZLA) - Miguel Fleitas (CUB) - Maximo Caminero (CUB) - Frank Hyder (EE.UU) Angel Vapor (CUB) - Yovani Bauta (CUB) - Blanca Caraballo (CUB) - Mariano Costa Peuser (ARG) - Cecilia Lueza (ARG) - Miguel Rodez (EE.UU) Collaboration: David Elgena (EE.UU) - Giselle Delgado (COL)- Katy Stallfus (EE.UU) - Brian Perez (EE.UU) - Brian Buck (EE.UU)

Nov 30th - Dec 4th | 2011

Bayfront Park Miami | Downtown

"GIANTS IN THE CITY is made possible with the support of the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs and the Cultural Affairs Council, the Miami-Dade County Mayor and Board of County Commissioners."