Monday, November 26, 2018

Hosting Projects for Basel Week


Well, acting itself is a form of disobedience, always
Marcel Alcala, Diana Lozano, Lucia Del Sanchez

Opens December 3  7-11pm



Hosting Projects is an artist run duo, Harris Bauer and Rachel Zaretsky, based in New York and Los Angeles focused on facilitation, curation, collaboration and conversation generated by new works from artists.

Swampspace presents Well, acting itself is a form of disobedience, always, an exhibition organized by Hosting Projects. The show features sculptures, paintings and multimedia works by Marcel Alcala, Diana Lozano and Lucia Del Sanchez, Latinx artists based in Miami and New York.
Alcala, Lozano and Sanchez wield ornamentation and embellishment as a tool in their glorification of excess turned descriptive language. They seek to reclaim existing iconography as well as desired cultural capital. Each of the works on exhibit come from a space reliant on the artists’ collective memory, drawing from their immediate surroundings and personal insight or nostalgia, while still reflecting something outside the realm of recognition. These objects play their own parts to perform their own existences. Each assemblage born in the lingering moment of awareness that camp is, in fact, a criticism.
Alcala’s use of humor, play, and the absurd critique the extremes and everyday banalities of societal power. Their pastel drawings are set in specific landscapes, embellished in a heightened aware- ness of the surreal as they praise the queer body and the brown body. Their images identify and contextualize these figurations in various social and community settings emulous of their everyday life, glimmering with icons of the banal. Their enactment of clownperformances manifest as both individual works or parties and, similar to Alcala’s paintings, drawings, and poetry, reference identity politics in order to explore the future/status of brown bodies in queer communities as well as various cities around the country.
Lozano’s sculptures blend botanical and synthetic imagery. Her fabrications, as they hang from the ceiling or stand as monumental objects, magnify elements often seen as complementary. She treats these objects in a collage like manner, elevating each component from its original state of recognizability to its fantastical counterpart, an individual artery within each of her compositions. Accessorizing her work with earrings, charms, wax, paint, flowers and leaves, she evokes a peripheral familiarity, calling attention to items often seen within dollar stores and city shops. Her work in further adorning these sculptural objects, normally used in adornment themselves, evokes a desire to belong, perform, and call upon a constructed identity through fashion artifacts and cultural specificity.
Sanchez’s work is consistently reflective of Miami’s socio-political structures and climate dependencies. Born and raised in Miami Beach, she often takes performative action towards immortalizing the city’s various singularities and mannerisms. In this installation of stolen banners, Sanchez embellishes upon imagery that at one point was used to mask developing construction sites for luxury buildings. Sewing, tearing, and revealing sub contexts to these images by way of dried flowers, leaves and shells found on Florida beaches, as well as brightly colored beads and paint, evoke a culture of celebration. Once skins for capitalist visions, they take the form of a newly independent body, pulling away from their previous purpose. They are imbued with sentiment, now part of an emotionally aware landscape. Her treatment of these 20 foot long banners promotes their tactility, rather than their reflection of modernity, and confront notions of excavation, anthropology and desire. 



Marcel Alcala (b. 1990 Santa Ana, CA) is a Mexican-American artist who creates events and encounters that upend the expectation of art as a discrete work exhibited for a specific period of time. They often collaborate with artists and specialists in fields such as science, literature, film, music, and architecture. Alcala ventures outside of institutional structures to contextualize their work in public space. Alcala’s diverse practice includes performance, live situations, installations, objects, and drawings. They graduated from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2012, and currently live in Brooklyn, NY.

Diana Lozano (b. 1992 Cali, Colombia) received her BFA from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in 2013. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn. She has shown at The General Consulate of Colombia in New York, Company Gallery, Fisher Parrish Gallery, AMO Studios, La Mama Galleria, Splatterpool Art Space, Casa Prado in Colombia, Guerrero Gallery in San Francisco and Open Space in Baltimore.

Lucia Del Sanchez (b. 1992 Miami, FL) is a Cuban-Slovenian artist. Her artistic practice includes photography, performance, sculpture and painting, drawing from her familial history, migrations through various cities, and her experience as a child model in the early 90s. Her work traces a personal narrative with an eye towards archaeology, collection and observation as well as the fossilization of memory, to produce temporal poetics and protracted self portraits. She graduated from the Cooper Union in NYC, also studying at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Holland as well as the European Exchange Academy in Germany. Sanchez currently lives in Miami. 

Swampspace is an established artist run exhibition space and studio run by Oliver Sanchez in Miami’s Design District welcoming a show organized by emerging artists with their own practice of curating and roots in Miami.

swampy60th





Tuesday, May 22, 2018

The Magic Hour by Jose Felix Perez





ART EXHIBITION OF JOSE FELIX PEREZ - RECENT PAINTINGS AT SWAMPSPACE IN THE DESIGN DISTRICT

Opening Reception May 25  7-11pm

Jose Felix Perez - The Magic Hour

The Everglades is a test. If we pass it, we may get to keep the planet.” 
Marjory Stoneman Douglas

On the evolution of American landscape painting, Jose Felix Perez is perhaps best defined as the Charles Burchfield of the swamp. A Miami native, Jose attended New World School of the Arts where he readily embraced romantic landscape painting to depict the threatened wilderness of our tropical home, in all of its wild, colorful vibrancy. He follows the legendary Highwaymen and Backus with his distinctive renditions of our most precious resource. Spaces between colors and rhythm of shapes are interwoven with a hypnotic tranquility of our alluring and seemingly endless natural environment. Perez deftly blends a palette of prismatic colored brilliance to create enduring compositions more akin to Jackson Pollack than Clyde Butcher. During the magic hour, that perfect time photographers and painters embrace, everything seems bathed in bronze, crisp light. But it's elusive and fragile, just like the tropical nature that surrounds us, threatened from every side. With his unique vision of our beloved river of grass, we are privileged to witness nature at its best, be it within our backyards or deep in a cypress hammock. For his first solo show at Swampspace, Jose Felix Perez offers recent works for your allegorical mythic experience.

Special thanks:  Miami Design District

Overgrown 2018 Jose Felix Perez

Monday, April 30, 2018

Swampy Symposiums

Please visit the Public Space Challenge and show your support for our Storytelling Project by posting a comment. 

http://www.publicspacechallenge.org/place/531688

SWAMPY SYMPOSIUMS - Tales from the Tropics

This is our chance to gather, discuss and contemplate the last remaining stretch of fragile natural shoreline along Biscayne Bay mainland. From Brickell to Aventura, there is now a concrete sea wall that obfuscates and imperils the most vulnerable microcosm of marine sea life. This continuous barrier separates us from nature while defending against rising tides. Join us for lively storytelling and discussions on how to best interact with our surroundings and preserve a sustainable approach to balance our urban lifestyle and nature conservation.



my_image


SWAMPY SYMPOSIUMS - Tales from the Tropics
Gatherings where Storytellers and open discussion help shape our urban-centric view of nature.

1. Story Time on the Shoreline - Pallot Park
2. Lemon Rhymes on the Causeway - Stearns Park
3. Rough, Ready and Freddy - Martell Park

STORY TIME ON THE SHORELINE is the first in a series of nomadic gatherings presented by local artists to raise awareness of our natural environment often hidden in plain sight. We begin at PALLOT PARK where one can wade along some of the last remaining natural shoreline on this stretch of Biscayne Bay. The gathering aims to inform visitors on the importance of a healthy microcosm, from tiny creatures to birds and dolphins that inhabit our tropical treasure, Biscayne Bay.
LEMON RHYMES ON THE CAUSEWAY - Next we venture south just a few steps to STEARNS PARK to stand firmly at the edge of a concrete sea wall. In the shadow of the bridge we find another microcosm of tiny creatures and algae that reveal arguably the unchanging rhythm of the sweeping tides. Here we discuss local history with a focus on poetry as a form of personal expression.

ROUGH, READY AND FREDDY - Lastly those in attendance can take a walk on the rough side to visit MARTELL PARK but take caution as Martell is also canine friendly. Here we discuss the dogginess of our self-correcting environment and look for clues to understand our roles in this unique microcosm of Miami.

Monday, March 19, 2018

Ilian Velasco - I Swim...


We are thrilled to host the Premier of  

I Swim Even When the Water’s Cold  by Ilian Velasco 

Opening Reception March 24th  7-10 pm

With pen in hand and a passion for precision, Ilian Velasco creates delicate abstractions of intricate geometric compositions worthy of prolonged contemplation. Her work invokes serenity of thought coupled with the tension of our improbable quest for idyllic achievements.  Mrs. Velasco illustrates that the shortest path between two points is indeed a straight line and with many lines she weaves an infinate web of labyrinths for our crafty meditation of the meticulous. 

“With these drawings I contemplate the tension between illusive perfection and the luring appeal of discreet imperfection. Mistakes that make my work human contrast with the commonplace unsympathetic renderings by computer programs.  The geometric integration of ink on paper in space invoke illusionary objects of deliberate vulnerability as the work takes ownership of the maker. There is something cumulative and liberating about repetition that compels me to take pause from the mundanities of daily doldrums.”

Special Thanks: Miami Design District - BoxElder Beer - Douglas Hoekzema