Posts: 4

1. No longer in photos, still in the heart

   12.Apr.07, 22:42 EDT
   
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   No longer in photos, still in the heart, by Ana Menendez. Published on December 7th, 2005 in The Miami Herald, Page 1B (Miami, FL). by Ana Menendez, amenedez@herald.com Published by The Miami Herald on December 7, 2005, Page 1B (Miami, FL) The changes roiling Miami have left behind few disinterested parties: For every dissident of the new there stands an ecstatic prophet of progress. Xavier Cortada's vision subscribes to neither extreme, preferring to mark time's changes with the bemused detachment of a doting parent. And in a weekend marked by visual extravagance, Cortada's installation at Omni Art stood out as much for its humanity as for its simplicity. ''Absence of Place,'' which ended Sunday, explored the connection between time and memory by juxtaposing photos of the new with captions of what used to be. The photographs, displayed in plastic bags like evidence, documented both communal memories of Miami and the artist's personal recollections. Written beneath a photograph of the Walgreens that now inhabits a former tire store: ''FIRESTONE.'' Beneath a shot of an Office Depot: ``I first drank Vietnamese coffee at this restaurant on Coral Way and 27th Avenue.'' WHAT'S NOT THERE Taken as a whole, the installation was a monument to absence: There were photographs of missing graffiti, vanished restaurants and empty lots where buildings used to be. ''Lydia was my junior high prom date to this hotel'' reads the caption beneath the skeleton of a budding building. The photographs were printed on cardstock and aged to look like vintage postcards. And one of the installation's strengths came from the play of image and context: At first glance, it was easy to believe that the Office Depot had stood on that Coral Way corner for decades. It's just the sort of sly glance at history (and its poor country cousin, nostalgia) that ran through the entire project. It was impossible not to note that the 180 photographs covered an entire wall of a downtown warehouse that is itself destined to make way for the new. But ''Absence of Place'' engaged without preaching, a refreshing reminder that there is life beyond blunt opinion, and that it is art that takes us there. ''I'm not sitting here lamenting what there was,'' Cortada said Monday as he prepared to take down the exhibit. ``It would be arrogant to think that a building of my childhood is any more important than a building of someone else's childhood. . . . I look at this wall as naturally as I see death.'' In the era of blockbuster exhibits that draw huge corporate sponsorship -- The Herald's support of the King Tut exhibit a case in point -- it is worth seeking out that art that transcends the practical. To remember that the best art -- whether a painting or a historic building -- is unconcerned with questions of profit or ``usefulness.'' In rejecting an easy point of view, ''Absence of Place'' makes a larger one about the value of process over destination and dialogue over certainty. `JUST THINK' Art Basel brought a lot of frivolity and commercialism to Miami, but it also opened a space for the imagination. And cities no less than people cannot survive without an ability to re-imagine themselves. ''Don't applaud, just think,'' gallery owner Bernice Steinbaum admonished a crowd gathered for a performance Thursday night. In his own way, Cortada was saying the same thing. ''Absence of Place'' was as much about memory as about the way time moves through us. A companion exhibit revisited a favorite Cortada image, the mangrove seedling. The white silhouette was entombed in concrete and surrounded by actual seedlings -- an echo of the ecosystem Miami replaced. But mourning would be premature. Among Cortada's photographs was one of Bear Cut in Key Biscayne. Australian pines once choked the beach. Then Hurricane Andrew came through and wiped out the trees and the pine needle floor that, for Cortada, so evoked the time of his adolescence. Today, the photograph documents a more ancient memory: an open beach blanketed with mangrove. To see his work go to: www.cortada.com

2. ABSENCE OF PLACE

   12.Apr.07, 22:40 EDT
   
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   ABSENCE OF PLACE The landscape changes, but memories persist: An artist invites the public to collaborate on a work to remember a vanished past, by Ana Menendez. Published on Sunday, January 15th, 2006 in The Miami Herald, Page 1A and Page 1L (Miami, FL). Click here for the full article

3. Art Exhibit Gives Place a Fresh New Perspective

   12.Apr.07, 22:38 EDT
   
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   Art Exhibit Gives Place a Fresh New Perspective. By Lydia Martin. Published on Sunday, April 23rd, 2006 in The Miami Herald, Page 1A (Miami, FL). The work of artists in the heart of Miami's building boom is featured in a new show opening Wednesday at the Miami Art Museum. Who but artists, traditionally short on green but in need of work space and community, would appropriate derelict buildings and menacing streets? True, the gentrification they help ignite when they open studios and galleries in down and out 'hoods -- SoHo, South Beach, Wynwood -- is the very thing that eventually pushes them out. But that's progress. On Wednesday, the Miami Art Museum previews a show dedicated, you could say, to progress. Miami in Transition, which officially opens Friday, features the work of 21 artists who live and work in the dust of Miami's bulldozers and the shadows of its building cranes. Among them: Spanish-born Vicenta Casañ, whose dreamlike digital images depict steel and glass towers floating in the clouds; Argentine-born Patricio Cuello, whose mixed-media installation, 24-inch House, speaks to the scarcity of space; and Cuban-American Xavier Cortada, whose Absence of Place uses snapshots to convey the disorientation that ensues when all of your landmarks vanish. As the building boom hustles their city toward a new, if still unresolved, identity, these 21 artists couldn't help but muse -- about impermanence, about sense of place, about both the vision and shortsightedness inherent in concrete and steel campaigns. Some are for change. Some against. Many seem driven to document the past as a way of deciphering the future. ''What they have in common is that they are all witnesses,'' said Lorie Mertes, MAM's assistant director for special projects, who curated the show with assistant Rene Morales. ``More than that, they have played a role. Artists become the catalyst for change in neighborhoods that go from funky to fabulous after they move in.'' A DISAPPEARING MIAMI Michael Loveland, a Miami native and New World School of the Arts graduate, is one to value the funky over the fabulous. He collects discarded traffic markers, billboards and shop signs that stand as relics of a disappearing Miami. His Development Opportunity for Sale, commissioned for the MAM show, features an old hand-painted billboard for Everglades airboat rides that came down in one of last year's storms. ''It's a design sensibility that seems lost in the age of the digital printout,'' said Loveland, who lives in the gentrifying Upper Eastside. ``There is another old sign from a beauty shop on Northeast Second Avenue painted by a street sign painter named Serge, who paints all the sandwiches and dripping beer bottles on neighborhood bodegas. It's the simplicity of it. Now that creativity is being swept away by higher rents. That color palette is disappearing.'' What Leila A. Leder-Kremer laments most about disappearance is that Miamians don't lament it more. Landmarks fall and nobody flinches, she learned when she began documenting the demolition of the Everglades Hotel and the Dupont Plaza with fellow artist Thomas Brian Virgin. ''There are a lot of people in Miami who are not from here. They lack a connection to the city's past. Buildings go and it doesn't mean anything to them,'' said Leder-Kremer, who moved to Miami from Buenos Aires seven years ago. ``Immediately, nobody remembers what used to stand there.'' She and Virgin crafted a zoetrope -- a 19th-century optical device that creates a movie-like effect with a rotating set of still images -- to tell the story of the Everglades Hotel implosion. Except, they tell it in reverse, with the 1926 Mediterranean Revival building rising like a felled giant ready to reclaim its place on Biscayne Boulevard. ''We started with the idea of a flip book,'' said Leder-Kremer. 'The zoetrope was initially Thomas' idea. It's a device that disappeared when motion pictures arrived. It's about the past making way for the future.'' Leyden Rodriguez-Casanova's Home glorifies his own past much the way developers glorify the promise of a new glass-and-steel future. The architectural model of his family's modest Kendall house has no zenned-out pool deck, no glam rooftop party space. ''It's incredible what a big deal is made about new constructions. But everybody is engaged in creating their space,'' Rodriguez-Casanova said. ``My parents were lower middle class. They could barely afford to buy the house. They improved things as they could. ``One of the best examples is the tile in the back patio. It's a mosaic of hand-me-down tiles, from people who had a few tiles left over from different jobs. My father would run out of one tile and keep going with a different tile.'' It's been five years since MAM last devoted a show solely to Miami artists -- a period of explosive growth. Condo developers have relied on the promise of a flourishing arts scene to lure buyers, and artists, in turn, have found a burgeoning market for their works among the city's monied new residents. Many of the fresh faces that emerged from that mix are represented in the show. ''When I went away to college, I wanted to get out of this town so badly,'' Loveland said. ``If you had told me I would come back and buy a house a block off Biscayne, I would have said you were crazy. I went to New York. But I moved back because I felt much more inspired to work here.'' SEEING WITH NEW EYES Rodriguez-Casanova tries to see Miami with new eyes, too. ''The city has really changed. But there are some things that make it feel like the same old provincial place,'' he said. 'Like driving down Biscayne and seeing the ugly yellow lines that were drawn over the new brick work in front of the Performing Arts Center. I guess it takes time to mature. But the art world definitely is growing. We seem to be moving out of the dead Cuban painters' shadow.''

4. Absence of Place: Reader's Views

   12.Apr.07, 22:36 EDT
   
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   Absence of Place: Reader's Views. By Jennifer Jenkins. As buildings vanish, so does history. By Paul George. Published by The Miami Herald on Sunday, June 4, 2006, Pages 1L, 2L and 6L (Miami, FL) Click here for full article