PULSE Miami Beach 2016: Programming

PROJECTS

PULSE Art Fair’s signature PROJECTS program is committed to the presentation and promotion of audience-engaging large-scale sculptures, installations and performances.

Anne Spalter

This year, PULSE debuts its first PROJECTS Special Commission featuring digital artist, Anne Spalter and the installation of her Miami Marbles. Using photographs and video replicas of last year’s Miami Art Week, Spalter digitally alters and distills images of the city’s atmosphere, architecture and foliage to create contemporary landscapes. By abstracting Miami’s topography, Spalter encapsulates the vibrancy of the city within each of her expansive spheres. An augmented reality component will allow guests to engage with the orbs through an interactive interface. Viewers will be able to explore kaleidoscopic moving videos on the spheres and discover virtual orbs around the fair through the custom Marbles app. An extension of Anne Spalter's PROJECTS Special Commission will also be on view at the COMO Metropolitan Miami Beach Hotel.

Digital mixed-media artist Anne Spalter is an academic pioneer who founded the original digital fine arts programs at Brown University and The Rhode Island School of Design. Spalter, who studied mathematics as a Brown undergraduate before receiving an MFA in painting from RISD, has a longstanding goal of integrating art and technology. Her work is housed in the permanent collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum (London, UK); The Albright-Knox Museum (Buffalo, NY); the RISD Museum (Providence, RI); among others. Spalter is currently part of the 2015/2016 Lumen Prize Global Exhibition Tour and sits on the board of the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Beach Sessions

Following the sun and waves, curator Sasha Okshteyn brings her heralded performance series Beach Sessions from New York's Rockaway Beach to Miami Beach. Beach Sessions is a pioneering performance series supporting the presentation of site-responsive work by innovative choreographers. The mission of Beach Sessions is to create a sustained investment in the natural beauty of our shorelines. At PULSE Miami Beach, Beach Sessions will present performances by BOOMERANG and Loni Landon. BOOMERANG's performance For the Toward features performers who strain against crushing weight. They coax, ride, and hurl steel sculptures that are the immediate result of relentless labor, attempting to create a bearable environment in which to mutually exhale and endeavor. Using idiosyncratic movement invention, unpredictable phrasing, and a commitment to full on embodied motion, BOOMERANG creates intense explorations of how human histories might be sensitively layered, distorted, and recontextualized. Loni Landon's Fast Love, a work which dissects the idea of connection as informed by our contemporaneously socialized selves, will be reimagined and intertwined with new material for an intimate duet seat against the backdrop of the beach. Landon is known for creating lush, innovative movement full of subtle detail and sophistication, and maintaining a highly charged emotional current throughout. Upholding to the integrity of the movement itself, Landon’s works search for honest reaction and expression while shedding the performance persona. On Thursday December 1 and Friday, December 2, BOOMERANG will perform at 11am, 3pm and 6pm. On Saturday, December 3, BOOMERANG will perform at 11am, 3pm and 6pm and Loni Landon will perform at 1pm and 5pm. On Sunday, December 4, BOOMERANG will perform at 11am and 3pm and Loni Landon will perform at 12pm and 4pm.

Erica Prince

First of all, you deserve this. Give yourself this time to be. / I will be there too, but this is really about you. / We can’t deny our physical selves, so let’s experiment shall we? PULSE presents Erica Prince’s Transformational Makeover Salon, a relational project and installation. On December 1, the opening day of the fair, Prince will be taking appointments in the salon, inviting participants to undergo Transformational Makeovers. The Transformational Makeover projects (ongoing since 2014) are about experimenting with physical appearance in an effort to gain perspective on one's everyday self. They are not about beauty, but focus instead on the liberating opportunity to become something else for a moment. Performances will occur during the Private Preview Brunch and the Young Collectors Cocktails. Erica Prince is a New York based artist whose drawings, sculpture and relational projects explore a multiplicity of lifestyle design choices- none better or truer than another. She is interested in how these choices reflect our states of being, our essential and constructed identities and our hopes and dreams for the future. Visit www.erica-prince.com for more information. You may hate your transformed self and that is ok. / Perhaps your disgust will give you perspective on your “old” self. / You may love the transformation and see yourself in a new light. / Either way, you will have gained perspective.

Peter London Global Dance Company

The Peter London Global Dance Company is South Florida's premiere multicultural contemporary dance company. For PULSE Miami Beach, PLGDC will present SOKAISO, a work of pure beauty and joy that encapsulates the joie de vivre of life expressed in the Carnival festivities of the Caribbean and South America during the Young Collectors Cocktails.

Zoë Buckman

From the series Mostly It’s Just Uncomfortable, Champ, is part of Buckman's response to the attack on Planned Parenthood in the United States, the consequent deprivation of access to free sexual health care for underserved women, as well as the attempted curtailing of a woman’s right to make choices concerning her own body.

Jason Hackenwerth

Jason Hackenwerth's Pupa is symbol of metamorphosis. Floating overhead and rotating ever-so-slowly, Pupa rises ten feet from the bottom to its curved top where the larva-like form opens and fans outward and down to form a woven web-like dome filled with thousands of translucent latex balloons that will illuminate this floating biomorphic cupola. The larval portion is intended to represent human kind’s lower nature, guided by fear, greed, and desire. As the form ascends and opens into the more delicate translucent shroud, it suggests the potential for transcendence, or the realization of the subtle body, which is believed to accompany our physical form and carry on beyond our mortal existence. Pupa is a symbol of the precipice upon which mankind begins to wake from the dream of delusion and deep unconsciousness. A liminal space from which the future cannot be seen but the behavior of past is no longer a viable mode of existence.

Jinie Park

Jinie Park creates ethereal works on canvas with thinly layered, translucent washes of paint. Through her abstraction she investigates and engages with the history and conventions of painting, applying paint on all sides of her canvas. Her physical involvement with, and manipulation of the work renders the painting a sculptural quality. What becomes evident upon viewing is that Park's unconventional painting methods and installations provide the viewer with a particular spatial and perceptual experience. She examines not only the transcendent beauty of the object, but the space it consumes. Born in Seoul, South Korea in 1987, Park received a BFA in Painting at Seoul National University (Seoul, South Korea) in 2011 and an MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art (Baltimore, MD) in 2015. Her work has been shown in 2014 at the Louisiana Biennial Juried Exhibition, School of Design at Louisiana Tech University (Ruston, LA) and in 2010 in a juried exhibition at Weiser Gallery, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, MA). Park was awarded the Henry Walters Traveling Fellowship in 2015 and the LeRoy E. Hoffberger Scholarship from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2013. In 2009 she was awarded the Choi Wook-Kyung Prize from Seoul National University.

Andrew Schoultz

A former professional skateboarder and internationally celebrated muralist, Andrew Schoultz is well known for his densely packed and meticulously rendered works that reflect the turmoil of the contemporary world. Schoultz interweaves visually dazzling imagery with intense visions of a planet threatened by over-crowding and over-consumption, and societies under siege by governments that are ostensibly there to protect them. This mural, like all of Schoultz’s work, is rooted in history and its cyclical, repetitive nature—a repetition also echoed stylistically. The all-seeing-eye, a symbol of capitalism taken from the back of the one-dollar bill, is a common motif in Schoultz’s work. It speaks to the idea of trying to gain clarity and parse out the truth in confusing and troubling times, in which an overwhelming amount of public information is not necessarily providing us with a more accurate sense of what is going on in our society. The eye also refers to an age in which we are relentlessly surveilled and recorded by cameras, phones, computers, and social media; it serves as an emblem of the quasi-security state we’ve become. Though Schoultz’s work alludes to conspiracy theories, the concealed occult, false flag operations, the futility of war, and the degradation of our environment, his primary goal is not didactic. Instead, he seeks to express the chaotic, disconcerting state of the world today

Ben Skinner

Ben Skinner’s No Future Plans presents contrasting concepts of participation, camouflage, and design. Showcasing the fascination with materiality and linguistic nuance that runs through his work, Skinner’s No Future Plans merges wordplay with considered material application. The large 3D letters are surfaced with a decorative marbling technique, at once evocative of traditional book arts and design as well as natural forms. The ornamental treatment hints at the mute dialogue of end pages in books, or even an absurd attempt at disguise. Skinner's disclosure manifests a societal ennui, questioning the dual roles of participation and memory while simultaneously hinting at reckless intent.

Amelia Toelke

Dragon fruit is a wild looking food grown throughout Southeast Asia. It is the fruit of a particular species of cactus and has a thick magenta skin with flame-like unfurling petals that makes it look completely foreboding and inedible. When you cut it open an even more intense fuchsia pulp lies inside. You would expect that all this show would lead to the most delicious, sweet flesh but instead, the flavor is mild, even tasteless. As with the fruit, Dragonfruit is all show. Inspired by the artist’s two years living abroad in Northern Thailand, Dragonfruit echos the rich and lustrous surfaces that ornament Thai Buddhist temples and integrates the history of adornment, decoration, and material culture. Dragonfruit presents the shapes and symbols of signage and badges but reveals only a shiny reflection that saturates the space with light and color. Despite visual cues that indicate information, celebration, and commemoration, you are left with just yourself and your image.

Perspectives

PERSPECTIVES is a platform for the exploration of themes and issues within the contemporary art market.

PULSE Miami Beach collaborated with The Creators Project to move PERSPECTIVES for the first time to the digital realm, allowing more people the opportunity to hear and learn from the participants. This edition features three acclaimed contemporary artists Esmeralda Kosmatopoulos, Erica Prince and Jean-Pierre Roy. Additional PERSPECTIVES will be filmed onsite at PULSE Miami Beach.

play

PLAY is a dedicated showcase for video and new media, serving as a platform to encourage discovery within the digital realm.

The 2016 Miami Beach edition of PLAY is curated by Jasmine Wahi and Rebecca Jampol, Co-Founders and Directors of Gateway Project Spaces, and is the first time in PULSE’s twelve-year history the call for submissions was extended beyond exhibitors and opened to the public. Wahi and Jampol selected 10 video works, from the 800 submissions received, to be exhibited onsite at PULSE Miami Beach from Thursday, December 1 through Sunday, December 4. Works selected for PLAY, along with 5 short-listed videos, will debut in a pre-fair collaborative exhibition at Gateway Project Spaces on October 26, 2016 from 6pm-9pm.

The curators were given full creative and thematic license to select works and in the process developed the thesis of “Body As…” investigating the human body’s relationship to social constructs and self-determination. “For this year’s PULSE PLAY we have curated a constellation of videos stemming from the nuanced ways in which the human body functions as a catalytic object for social constructionism,” Wahi and Jampol offer in a joint-statement, “Within Body As… we have designated loose categorizations that exemplify these phenomenon, utilizing each piece dually as a device to express these ideas and to reflect them. The overarching themes within this vision are: Individual Identity, Collective Identity, and Socio-Political Identity, which exists as the intersection of the personal and collective identities.”

The selected finalists are all working artists, ranging from the undiscovered and emerging to recognized and represented. The list of categorizations and titles being presented are as follows:

Body as Ritual: Margaret Rorison Pull/Drift, 2013, 16mm, 9 minutes
Body as War: Margarita Sanchez Urdaneta, Mouth Filled With Ash, 2015, Two-channel video, 21:12 minutes
Body as Prey: Andy Fernandez, Sandra, 2016, Two-channel video, 4:46 minutes
Body as Object: Dominique Duroseau, Addressing Baldwin, 2016, Single channel video, 1:22 minutes
Body as America: Capt. Larry, LAZY GENiUS Presents: MiSS AMERiCA, 2016, Single channel video, 6:45 minutes
Body as Machine: Jon Jacobsen, Insula, 2016, Single channel video, 2:25 minutes
Body as Memory: Diana Salcedo, Garden Conversations, 2016, Single channel video, 11:41 minutes
Body as Beauty: Rashaad Newsome, Stop Playin’ In My Face, 2016, Single channel 3-D video
Body as Alien: K. Yoland, Military Cut, 2013, Single channel video, 15:13 minutes
Body as Savory: Jessica Posner, Butter Body Politic (Butterface), Single channel video, 10:53 minutes

“These categorizations are not intended to create a unilateral definition for each piece; nor are they meant to be a straightforward assessment of the these particular social constructs,” Wahi and Jampol offer, “Some categorizations are intentionally ironic; others intentionally prosaic.” The videos offer a range of expressions of how bodies exist in time and space, beyond the expected or familiar. Take for example, how Rorison inserts gesture and movement into group dynamics, thus creating a new, fluid form of group ritual, or Urdaneta’s Mouth Filled With Ash, which meditates on mourning and mass graves through silence and poetic epithets of prose. The black female body and what it means to be black in America is put front and center in Fernandez’s two-channel examination of police brutality, Duroseau’s short, glitchy presentation and Capt. Larry’s highly charged montage. Jacobsen’s cyborg abstraction, a finalist in ShowStudio’s fashion film awards, wonders of life beyond bodies, while Salcedo compares the geometries of bodily movement with that of nature, questioning our inextricable relationship and Yoland asks if humans are the only intelligent life in our galaxy. Finally, Posner unearths society’s perception of perfect bodies in an absurd yet raw performance.

“Through PULSE’s programming platforms we are able to further expand our reach, experiment with new ideas, and partner with industry talent adding to the excitement surrounding each edition,” says director Helen Toomer. “Working with Wahi and Jampol has been a joy. They took on a herculean task and produced a compelling project that we are all very proud of.”

PRIZE

The PULSE Prize is a jury-awarded cash grant presented directly to an artist of distinction who will be chosen from a solo artist presentation by an IMPULSE Exhibitor.

PULSE Miami Beach 2016 PRIZE Nominees:

Sam Burford | FIUMANO PROJECTS, London, UK
Sharon Butler | SEASON, Seattle, WA
Chen Chen + Kai Williams | kinder MODERN, New York, NY
Jessica Drenk | Adah Rose Gallery, Kensignton, MD
Henriette Grahnert | KLEINDIENST, Leipzig, Germany
Thrush Holmes | BEERS London, London, UK
Mark Joshua Epstein | Vane, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
Esmeralda Kosmatopoulos | Sarl Galerie Christophe Tailleur, Strasbourg, France
Andrew McIntosh | bo.lee gallery, London, UK
Sean Newport | Cordesa Fine Art, Los Angeles, CA
Rashaad Newsome | De Buck Gallery, New York, NY
Adriana Ospina | DANTE AND RANDALL, Bogota, Colombia
Fernando Otero | CEDE GALERIA, Lima, Peru
Devan Shimoyama | Samuel Freeman, Los Angeles, CA
Hiroshi Shinno | YOD Gallery, Osaka, Japan
Bradley Wood | Sim Smith, London, UK