Neighborhood Restoration Project North of the Miami Modern District Presented by the Florida Mining Gallery and Harbinger Sign
North of Modern #nomo is a multi-disciplinary art experience featuring a diverse array of 24 contemporary artists in a variety of mediums ranging from paintings to sculpture to video projection and performance art, as well as pop-up shops selling art and vegan fashions by OlsenHaus. Jacksonville-based Florida Mining Gallery is excited to be curating this multi-building art experience during Art Basel Miami Beach 2013, the premiere contemporary art event in the art world.
The purpose of this art exhibition is to increase awareness of a neighborhood restoration project that is underway at Biscayne Plaza, which will be transformed into a new facility named Midpoint.
Harbinger Sign – Preserving Florida Culture
Harbinger Sign’s commitment to preserving Florida culture is part of its mission to be Forward Thinking. Forward Doing. Art Basel Miami Beach has already proven that by bringing the world’s art focus to Miami, it has the power to revitalize neighborhoods. Majestic Properties and Global Fund Investments want to see this same future for the Little Haiti neighborhood surrounding Biscayne Plaza. To this end, the developers have acquired and restored six significant spaces, including a picturesque Art Deco, Post-Modern 5,000sf building as the property’s centerpiece and invited Florida Mining Gallery (a division of Harbinger Sign) to curate these newly renovated properties as gallery space; hence the North of Modern art experience.“We see so much opportunity for revitalization in Florida, and we are excited to be a part of this incredible project,” says Steve Williams, President of Harbinger Sign and founder of Florida Mining Gallery. “Miami has so much of Florida’s cultural history evinced in its architecture and neighborhoods, it is crucial to support organizations committed to preserving and restoring those unique aspects of our state.”
Wynwood and Miami Modern have become thriving neighborhoods with rich art and youth cultures over the last ten years. As this trend moves north of the Miami Modern district, Majestic Properties and Global Fund Investments have taken the lead in restoring the Little Haiti neighborhood starting with Biscayne Plaza. By actively investing in this area and exposing the art community to this exciting emerging neighborhood, Majestic Properties and Global Fund Investments hope to see the trend continue with other area developers that share their vision of a new neighborhood. North of Modern is Harbinger Sign and Florida Mining’s contribution to this Florida restoration project.For more information:
http://floridamininggallery.com/exhibitions/north-of-modern/
http://floridamininggallery.tumblr.com
https://www.facebook.com/events/684356141584332
NORTH OF MODERN | 24 FEATURED ARTISTS
- Betsy Cain
- Mark Creegan
- Donald Dusinberre
- Christina Foard
- Ke Francis
- Mark George & Tony Rodrigues
- Thomas Hager
- Dustin Harewood
- Marcus Kenney
- Russell Maycumber
- Geoff Mitchell
- Ibrahim Miranda
- Hiromi Mizugai Moneyhun
- Kurt Polkey
- Chip Southworth
- Kedgar Volta
- Milagros Art Collective
- Liz Gibson
- Jeff Whipple
- Miami Invasion Street Art Collective
- School of Everything
- Quintron & Miss Pussycat
- RJ Pozniak
- Elizabeth Olsen
“Since my paintings are imagined, I use abstraction to invoke an image that encompasses the idea of residual visual memory of the body’s states of being, the external landscape, and collective cultural remembrances. I like the idea of a painting lingering in a sustained moment, caught in the act of change or transition. An apogee of action which is often then subjected to some erasure or obfuscation.”
“For this project, I am using drawings made over many years using marker on found papers. With these elements, I will construct arrangements to be hung in the space and on the walls.”
“As with anyone, my art courses took me through all sorts of styles and techniques, but my excitement didn’t usually come from getting the apple to look shiny or the model’s legs to look real. It was the stuff going on inside my head while I was working, regardless of what the product was. I began marrying the thoughts that ride alongside the process of creating art with the process itself, which is to say that the final product is not a ‘picture,’ but more like the evidence of an unusual event. Or maybe it just matches nicely with the sofa.”
Painting has been a pathway to open and react to memories; and when necessary, reframe and resolve them. Highly process oriented, my work is physical: pouring, spraying, sanding, scraping, carving paint at various stages and drying times, rhythmically moving between additive and subtractive methods. Every mark changes the entirety and creates a new puzzle to resolve. Therefore, I vacillate between analytical assessment and intuitive response. Letting go of controlled outcomes and a fixed plan is a constant in my philosophy. Taking risks with materials allows for surprising results and unplanned spaces, and over time, a specific language of symbols emerges. This affords a freedom to create my story without words.
I have struggled to take a singular vision and voice and carry them seamlessly across a variety of traditional forms. I cannot say that I have succeeded in this endeavor but recent developments in electronic media have made the task less complex. It is simpler than ever for one artist to move stories, text, and images through a variety of different mediums. The digital format makes the transfer simple. All that is needed is a consistent concept and the invention of unifying concept has been my continued focus for twenty years. Perhaps I’ll pull it off. In the meantime, just enjoy the art.
“Mark and Tony apply their distinctly nostalgic yet critical view of a select American consumer history that now exists only as a series of Pop relics. Mining this cultural trove of (sub)urban desire and gratification, the duo manage to pay homage to the patriotism of 1950s purchase power, even as they reveal the corruption beneath the glossy coat of “new and improved”. – Anthony Ausgang
As an award-winning participating artist in the prestigious Florence Biennale, Hager’s works have been exhibited at the Yossi Milo and Sears-Peyton Gallery in New York. His works are in the permanent collections of the Orlando Museum of Art, Huntsville Museum of Art, Mobile Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art Jacksonville, The Haskell Collection, Jennifer Johnson Duke Collection, and Henry Buhl Collection.
My latest paintings are portraits of poor young American children (the new Garbage Pail Kids.)
Kenney has exhibited in museums, institutions, galleries and art fairs internationally, including Tel Aviv, Paris, London, Montréal, New York, Boston, Chicago, Kansas City, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Miami and Portland. His work has been featured and reviewed in Art in America, New American Painting, Artpapers, Art News, New York Times, Boston Globe, ArtVoices, Antlanta Journal Constitution, New York Art Magazine, and Art News. A high quality monograph of his works was published by SCAD and has been distributed worldwide by DAP
Translation: I like to draw…a lot. I draw a lot of little drawings. I like using sumi ink because it puts down beautiful, flat, dark black lines. I also like the ritual aspects to its preparation. The ink comes as pine soot bound with bone glue into a stick form and is ground on a stone. My drawings are most often made on post-it notes, though I sometimes use regular paper or scraps like cardboard packaging or napkins…whatever I have on hand, really. Lately I have been considering how I use humor in my work. As a kid I grew up popular pulp publications like Mad and Cracked magazine. A lot of my heroes were comedians. I realize that I utilize the levity of humor to introduce emotionally weighted subject matter. Identity politics of aging, gender and social position riddled my process with quirky proboscis, fur and ill-fitted clothing. Weapons and petrochemical refuse were the logical conclusions to powerlessness and self-denial (guns, blades, and exhaust).
His works have been shown in prestigious biennales and can be found in the collections of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana; The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), New York; Museu da Gravura, Curitiba, Brasil; Thyssen – Bornemisza Contemporary Art Foundation, Anit, Austria; the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; the Peter Norton Collection, Los Angeles; Museum of Fort Lauderdale, ASU Art Museum, Arizona, and GRAPHICSTUDIO, Tampa, Florida, among others.
The serie “Islas Urbanas” it is an iconographic research on the metamorphosis that take place on urban schemes. The idea is to find anthropomorphic figures that at the same time form new constellations of organic order. These same figures could be talismans of identity without altering the original scheme of the city. They have always been there unseen.
Paper-cut artist Hiromi Mizugai moved to Jacksonville, Florida, in 2004 from her hometown of Kyoto, Japan, the capital city for close to a thousand years before Tokyo. She began drawing at a young age, and by her teen years had developed a style of her own. With no formal art training, Hiromi has evolved a unique homegrown artistic voice that combines traditional Japanese visual art forms with the super-modernity that is now found in all of Japan’s biggest cities. The most obvious reference is to Edo Period Japanese woodblock prints (moku hanga), which had a major influence on her budding artist’s mind early on.
As with woodblock prints, Hiromi’s three-dimensional cut paper pieces are the result of a multistep process that produces an art that is at once amusingly lighthearted and startlingly alive. Her pieces invite the viewer in; indeed, one feels compelled to reach out and touch the images. Like the works of all the great masters, Hiromi’s pieces are best appreciated when viewed in person.
“My art is a parody of art. More specifically, it parodies pictures by a man making pictures for men. It’s a type of picture making that pretends to forget that painting was de-gendered in the seventies. There’s was a time when painting was a ‘man’s game’ and people talked about ‘painting with cocks’ at the Cedar Bar. Feminism knocked the wind out of those sails, but what would art look like with some maleness put back in?
Kedgar emigrated to the United States in 2008, and since then, he has been able to draw on a dual cultural perspective, creating works that represent disparate lives and environments, but also narratives that serve to remind us of our common humanity. His art serves as both personal artifact and a reflection of our internal landscapes.
“The urban spaces I’m drawn to are defined as much by people as buildings and objects. Absent any human presence, I initially found this photo series incomplete – an unfinished canvas waiting to be populated. I decided to apply my own visual process of urbanization – relocating life and activity from one space to another, and in the process, creating the kinetic urban scene that I was originally looking for. After recording people moving through areas that approximated the physical perspective of my photos, I isolated their movements, removing all inanimate structures and objects. Applied to the photos, the dynamic elements in the projections migrate from video to print, and from conscious to concrete. Movements and paths through once empty physical spaces become defining characteristics of a new environment.”
Whipple’s paintings for a New Orleans library were selected as one of the 50 best public art projects in 2012 by the Public Art Network. His other public art commissions include an 80-foot long video on the exterior of the Tampa Museum of Art, a 300-foot long mural for the City of Tampa and a 150-foot long mural for a library in St. Petersburg, Florida. The Tampa Museum of Art commissioned Whipple to create a large-scale outdoor video and art installation in Miami Beach that was seen by hundreds of thousands during the week of Art Basel Miami in 2006.