small format ArtCenter/South Florida
Vol. 1O
Fall 2O17
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Vol. 1O This volume of small format focuses on the themes and ideas contained within the exhibition On Documentary Abstraction. Each contribution in this volume — by guest curator Rachael Rakes and artists Torkwase Dyson, Richard Ibghy and Marilou Lemmens — addresses expanded forms of visual abstraction and draws connections between history, politics and abstract forms.
INTRODUCTION
Rachael Rakes
In order to situate and sketch out this exhibition, I’m placing here a few broad points, an assertion or two, and some truisms that may be worth restating regarding the history and reception of abstract art and documentary:
development, in both.2 This legacy of high modernist discourse requires that there be retroactive repair of the figure/non-figure binary, or an assertive re-closure between the social conditions of visual abstractions and the aesthetic ground from which they were separated.3
“Everything is the same except composition and as the composition is different and always going to be different every- Documentary has never been real, thing is not the same.”1 and has from its beginning been a form of art. Early documentarian John The construction of abstraction as a Greirson’s originary definition of the 20th century phenomenon by Modernist discipline as “the creative treatment art historians (Clement Greenberg et al) of actuality” remains one of the most forged an enduring artificial distance useful descriptions of the aims of the between abstraction and representation, practice. Meanwhile, the ever-regeneratand between form and content. This ing criteria that documentary works be conceptualization ultimately ignored measured in proximity to reality creates centuries of abstract and formalist an unreasonable and recursive dynamic practices from around the world. It also in which actuality can never be reached. disregarded Modern Abstractionists’ This quest for truth underpins some of own acknowledgement of visual and the most regressive “ethnographic” contextual references outside of their impulses in the field. The prioritization own field. This specific separation of of realistic content over form guided form from content or context still ap- the “issue documentary” surge from pears as a construct across discourses 1990s on, during which documentary of art and politics, to the detriment of became the standard form of activist the complexity, and as deterrent to media, ostensibly cleaving it from the
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realm of art and re-branding the consumption of it as a form of democratic participation. That documentary image making continues to be measured along the lines of altruism or potential subject benefit reinforces a dated anthropological rationale. Documentary’s entrance in the contemporary art sphere, or the so-called Documentary Turn, along with hybrid and structural documentary practices in the cinema have helped to call the form back to the “creative treatment” concept, while introducing a whole new set of problems that attend works of politically or socially-engaged art. Modern and Contemporary Abstract Art has always been political, often operationally so. Beginning with Constructivism, forms of abstraction have long abetted or subverted social politics. Kazimir Malevich's obstructionist abstractions, for example, served the post-revolutionary Bolshevik government through avant-garde tactics, his Black Square forming, to quote Boris Groys “an open window through which the revolutionary spirits of radical destruction could enter the space of culture and reduce it to ashes.”4 Abstract forms have also been deployed as a means of protest. In 1940s Argentina, ar tists such as Tomás Maldonado and Gyula Kosice imagined abstract aesthetics as a means to constructing an alternative, collective society. They contended that if figurative art served the ruling class and fascism, abstraction could be the destabilizing art of the working class, and then applied abstract aesthetics to pamphlets and political posters.5 In 1960s Brazil, Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica activated abstraction through participation. Clark’s
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modular Bichos and Oiticica’s wearable Parangolés, brought abstract objects to life in order to engage the greater populace in the aesthetics — with the always-potential consequence of positively altering social relations. In the past several decades across the US, Black American artists have been using methods of formal coding and obstruction, referential hiding, and “smuggling” through abstraction in order to represent identity and recover history. Beverly Buchanan’s 1970s and 1980s cast concrete “ruins,” which were large anonymous slabs placed at sites of Black struggle around the American South, and Howardena Pindell’s 1970s colorful, large-scale pattern paintings which incorporated of symbols and shapes that reference painful memories and personal history, are two examples of many of what is now being more popularly considered a movement of socially-engaged Black Abstraction.6 Documentary Abstraction “Perhaps form can also fill language's void”7 On Documentary Abstraction posits a merger of documentary practice with abstract aesthetics, proposing to bring out the formal aspects of the former and the phenomenological aspects of the latter. The exhibition showcases a group of artists who have created new ways of communicating urgent and complex ideas and facts by deliberately co-prioritizing form and content. This combination goes beyond the execution of an exercise: in this overly image-saturated, overly mediated moment, in which we are constantly receiving new data
RACHAEL RAKES
through the flattened forms of news ideas about human labor into simple and social media, delivery is profoundly forms that resemble shapes found in critical. Reconfiguring perspective and Modern abstract art. In doing so, they perception is the task art is up to. In document how the aesthetics of facts applying artistic process to matters of structure thought and social relations. the real — changing the communication agent — it might be possible to influ- With subjects that operate at different ence not only perception but reception. distances from current lived existence, and with varying attendant pressures on This exhibition begins with a series of the present, the works in this exhibition prints by Eugenio Espinoza, a key figure offer up a glimpse into interrelated of the 1960s and 1970s Latin American modes of contemporary political abAvant-Garde. These photographs doc- straction. They then demonstrate the ument his grid interventions, in which artistic and communicative potential he placed the a large cloth printed with for deploying documentary through the iconic Modernist design into real life formalism, and imagine what a postscenarios and encouraged visitors to his figurative documentary practice might exhibitions to interact with it — literally look like. placing abstract aesthetics into lived existence. Notes Each of the contemporary artists in On Documentary Abstraction approaches 1 From Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, a explication and withholding differ- work of ontological substitutions. ently, offering widely divergent first 2 G. Roger Denson summarizes this argument impressions. Stylistically, Torkwase well in his essay “Colonizing Abstraction.” Dyson’s works often reference Abstract Expressionism. Their visceral patterned 3 To paraphrase a point in John Welchman’s foreground slightly conceals in their essay, On the Discourse of Abstraction. background data visualization of the 4 Groys, Boris. “Becoming Revolutionary: history of systemic violence against On Kazimir Malevich,” E-flux, Journal #47, Black Americans. Tomashi Jackson’s September 2013 intensely colored multi-media sculptural works are formally rigorous and 5 Pérez-Barreiro, Gabriel. Radical Geometry: Modern Art of South America from the Patricia immediately affective. While many of Phelps De Cisneros Collection. her works include hints of figuration, these are embedded like afterimages: 6 A thoughtful survey piece among a recent the referential key to these works constellation on the subject is Chloe Bass’s is often in their long titles, which mix “Can Abstraction Help us Understand the Value of Black Lives?” published in Hyperallergic. the names of Civil Rights court cases with contemporary sites of enduring 7 Campbell, Andy. “We’re Going to See Blood segregation and racialized oppression. on them Next: Beverly Buchanan’s Georgia Also identified by long and descrip- Ruins and Black Negativity,” Rhizomes. Issue 29, tive titles, Richard Ibghy and Marilou January 2016. Lemmens’ works transform complex
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SELECTIONS FROM "BLACK INTERIORITY: NOTES ON ARCHITECTURE, INFRASTRUCTURE, ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE, AND ABSTRACT DRAWING"
Torkwase Dyson
due to technology, environmental racism is exacerbated by human-induced In built and natural environments, each climate change, or what is being deobject helps define our conditions of clared the Anthropocene. The legacy of movement. The design of our physical environmental racism and the current world informs the methods in which traumas of global climate change motion emerges and spatial strategy make spatial planning — architectural is organized. For black people, moving and infrastructural representation and through a given environment comes design — an urgent concern for me in with questions of belonging and a self- contemporary abstract drawing. determination of visibility and semi-autonomy. This means for the systemi- 2. Notes: On Planning Black Spatial cally disenfranchised, compositional Strategies as Users (In Process) movement (ways in which the body unifies, balances, and arranges itself A. Aim_ to move through space) is a skill used My efforts are focused on developing in the service of self-emancipation a distilled abstract drawing practice in within hostile geographies. Further, the language of architectural and infrathe brain deciphers, measures, cate- structural representation that lends itself gorizes, and understands both imme- to participation in spatial development diate and distant physical forms in and more livable geographies. In drawrelationship to the spatial structures ing, I develop compositions, diagrams, defined by the conditions of power. marks, surfaces, and models toward these ends, always with the moveThis relationship of interior and exteri- ment of the human body in mind. Each or — black mind/body geographic ex- drawing is a form of analysis, looking periences — is inextricably tied to lands at the efficiencies in our current built and waters riddled with architectural and natural environments and the relaand infrastructural histories designed tionships people of color have to them. to isolate control over clean natural resources within white conservative B. Micro Subjects_ and corporate hyper-capitalist systems. Levees, bridges, water tables, buildings, Disenfranchised people of color have railroads, septic tanks, dams, houses, inherited this geographic isolation and warehouses, cables, pipes, meadows, can name it environmental racism. In this bunkers, trains, ships, mountains, rivers, moment of accelerated globalization sidewalks, corners, crosswalks, stairs, 1. Drawing_001_1865
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walls. As we navigate built environments we did not design, that we’ve learned through our experiences, authority over one’s mind/body in the labyrinth of forms, spaces, and objects is a question of race, composition, and materiality. From the concrete form of failed levees in New Orleans to the three 60-by60-inch concrete sidewalk squares underneath Eric Garner, we must be able to interrogate current infrastructure with new design solutions to advanced environmental conditions with our political and material futures in mind.
space that we must come to know and understand their operational capacity and how we feel about them is critical to creating the conditions under which environmental transformation occurs. Change is happening now and I understand contemporary abstract drawing as a major part of our current preparedness movement. 3. Black Compositional Thought: Between Representation and Abstraction Drawing
In my practice the perfect challenge of making distilled abstract drawing is developing a mindful awareness of lines and shapes that recognize the abilities of black bodies to expressively inhabit and negotiate constructions of space and materiality in real time. Another challenge is to produce compositions where the geometry of the image and object recognizes intuitive capabilities of the mind to articulate the abilities of space as a form. I’ve set up this mode of drawing as a way to respond to the conditions in which various systemic orders of political abstraction have been used in Architectural and infrastructural repre- the service of environmental exploitation. sentation has given me an expressive voice in conversations on spatial move- A. I ask myself, how do black people ment, development, organization, and survive abstraction today as the scope, design. It is a visual language that is scale, and density of matter is changing capable of describing or illustrating all around us due to climate change? I macro ideas of systemic order or the begin to answer by looking at what I call profound spatial strategies of fugitivity. black compositional thought. Abstract Within the context of abstract drawing, drawing can lend itself to the intellectual planning futures and investigating ongo- and psychological pursuit of pulling ing historical methods of spatial survival black compositional thought close. are direct lines of action/participation Really close, inside close. From the to environmental justice. The ability to black-inside-black position, I stand in create representational drawings that front of a surface with my mind in comdescribe more livable spaces and how plete awareness of form as power. As I we feel about them or describe existing begin to convey shape, line, movement, C. Macro Subjects_ Architectural zones, global standardization, fiber optics, water systems, telecommunications, aviation, NATO, the World Bank, railroads, corporations, private enterprise, industry. As we navigate these infrastructural operating systems that inform our built environments but are often not fixed architectural forms, we learn through a different kind of user experience that sovereignty over land, ear th, and ground is a question of dignity.
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weight, scale, proximity, and perspective, representations of subjects oscillate between scaled diagrammatic images and expressive drawings. In the act of making I understand that it is the integrations of forms folded into the conditions of black spatial justice where I begin to develop compositions and designs that respond to materials. Here I open up the power of abstract representation while engaging with the emotional implications of design space itself. This is the critical tension in the development of solutions that extend beyond the surface area of the drawing and empathy and into measurable, efficacious applications. What emerges are ideas and capabilities in relationship to how we invent in response to the varied material, geographic, and political conditions we inherit. I begin to work from a state of deep subjectivity in the drawings while aligning my thoughts with black spatial strategies designed and constructed to improve livability. These references range from the nomadic vernacular of the Tuareg people and the spatial planning of Cameroonian architecture to the stories of Anthony Burns and Assata Shakur, just to name a few. Taking these histories into account, I begin to understand that surviving abstraction through abstraction is my environmental project today.
economic conservatism. These systems continue to traumatize as we are forced out and away from lands and waters that give us life and form our identities. This legacy of forced movement includes the intercontinental slave trade, environmental terrorism in the form of lynch mobs and the KKK, the burning of black towns and churches, coal mining, failing infrastructures due to disinvestment and underinvestment, the industrial and nuclear revolution, toxic waste contamination from industrial run-offs, rising sea levels, redistricting, curfew laws, the decrease in biodiversity, droughts, and the colonization of water for extraction industries. Political abstraction set the geographic conditions for global spatial and environmental inequalities. In addition, the ways in which we see, write, and talk about these inequalities must be in relationship to our current climate crisis. There must be a broader narrative of black subjectivity in relationship to the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene project does not exist without the land, body, and labor of people of color in the modern design experiment. The absence of black labor politics in relationship to natural resources and early forms of architecture, agriculture, and engineering is an abstraction and continues to induce already harsh vulnerability through further erasure. Abstract drawing enables a pointed discussion B. The abstraction I refer to is also the of these structural histories and our political abstraction used to enact hy- participation in them. It can also prepare per-capitalist and white conservative our minds to compose with space and racist agendas upon black and brown materiality that will define our future.  geographies. For example, the history of policing and vagrancy laws, extraterritorial jurisdiction, and the exclusion of subjectivity in the discussion of the Anthropocene are all systems of political abstraction enacting modes of
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TORKWASE DYSON
EACH NUMBER EQUALS ONE INHALATION AND ONE EXHALATION
Richard Ibghy & Marilou Lemmens
It is at the end of the 19th century that the concept of objectivity and scientific methods of measurement were introduced to study human productivity, an event that had a tremendous effect on the way labor has been conceived, measured and designed ever since.
communication and workflows are sketched. In the process, abstract measurements transform complex ideas about human behavior into comparable data and labor becomes an abstraction that reduces the specificity and meaning of concrete labor to numerical units, in other words, to labor in general.
The doctrines of “work science,” “Fordism,” “Taylorism” and “scientific management” all represent particular versions of the attempt to find positivist and scientist resolutions to the question of production. Although they differ on many levels, what they share is a commitment to ideas of rationalization in addition to technological and social efficiency. The economic notion of efficiency, as the ratio of output to input, became the unquestioned rationality behind the new disciplines directed towards labor activities and labor relations.
It is this abstraction, from the concrete and particular to the general, which allows one to grasp labor quantitatively. Through this process, abstracted working activities can then be translated into a common medium — numbers — which may be compared and among which relations may be established. The capacity of graphs to make the relations between elements visible was precisely what made them fitted for the task.
Today, notions of economic efficiency and objective measures of work extend the original approaches of the late 19th century into every area of labor, technological efficiency and business organization. Diagrams, graphs, time and motion studies, tables, timelines, flowcharts and bar charts still play an In the book “The Human Machine important role in the propagation of and Industrial Efficiency,” published these ideas and the day-to-day evalua- in 1918 by Frederic S. Lee, we see a tion of worker performance. diagram charting the Output Among Men Polishing Metal on a Ten-Hour In graphs, labor is analyzed and Shift with No Rest Breaks Except for broken down into units, while new Lunch. The graph reveals the decline of methods for the management of time, productivity over time and constitutes
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a classic example of management scientists’ interest in maximizing productivity through optimal rest-break schedules. With the word “LUNCH” printed in the middle at the bottom, we can appreciate how the graph sought to communicate the temporality of the experiment visually.
realized by capturing the movements of workers with long photographic exposures. The motion “paths” recorded by the camera were traced by tiny lamps attached to the body of the worker. The images could then be translated into graphics such as Two Cycles on Drill Press and Natural Movement of the Hand / The Shortest Path After Developed in the late 19th century, the Operator has Been Trained. These photographic study of motion served as graphs were then analyzed by engineers a basis for the use of still and moving to reveal inefficient gestures and design images in the analysis of human move- the most time-efficient movement to be ment in industry. These approaches taught and used by all workers. were developed in the first decades of the 20th century by Frederick Taylor, Henry Ford, and Frank & Lillian Gilbreth in the context of an industrial economy and are still widely used today.
Flowcharts, which are endemic today in management and organization analysis, also appeared during the early part of the 20th century. The way flowcharts reduce activities, processes and complex actions into simplified workflows make them especially suited to the needs of management and administration. Because of its ability to present chronological sequences, the chart is instrumental in developing a plant layout or for improving existing ones. Diagram of the Revised Layout of a Group of Operations was produced Between 1910 and 1924, the Gilbreths to improve production by studying the devised multiple processes to use pho- layout of operations in a rifle factory. tographic images in factories and other places of work to determine the most Other diagrams, such as Organization efficient methods of operation or “the Chart- Showing the Influence of best way.” Their time and motion studies, Methods, Standards and Work Design also called chronocyclegraphs, were of the Operations of the Enterprise,
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RICHARD IBGHY & MARILOU LEMMENS
Trends in Periods 1 to 24 of the First Relay Experiment at Hawthorne presents a statistical analysis of the production for the 257 workweeks of the experiment.
reduce the entirety of relationships within an enterprise to discrete chunks of activity, work flows and hierarchical positioning. Organization charts are very clear and visually pleasing. That’s why they are used — because they look nice on paper or on a PowerPoint slide. Because they’re not generally worked out from hard data, they’re usually put on paper in a way that ‘feels’ best, and what ‘feels’ best is always whatever ‘looks’ best. Whole organizations are reorganized, wages are set, and instructions are written, based on sticks dipped in lavender and mint green food coloring. One of the most famous experiments in industrial history took place at the at Western Electric's factory at Hawthorne, near Chicago, between 1927 and 1933. The experiment involved changes in physical working conditions and work requirements, changes in management and supervision, and changes in the social relations of workers. Surprisingly, in all cases, productivity improved whenever a change was made. For instance, productivity improved when lighting in the workroom was augmented, but also when it was dimmed again. This became known as the “Hawthorne Effect” — a reaction in which individuals modified their behavior in response to their awareness of being observed. The graph entitled Worker Productivity
From the latter part of the 20th century to the present, what constitutes human productivity and how it can be measured have shifted as economies have gone through a series of transformations that have modified the nature, form and organization of labor. Amongst these transformations is a shift from the mass production of identical products to delocalized and more flexible manufacturing processes as well as to service and knowledge economies. While Fordist models considered labor as the harnessing of “manpower,” post-Fordist models necessitate the mobilization of not only logical and technical capacities, but also of the affective and communicative resources of the worker.
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Changes in the use and organization of workplaces reflect some of these transformations. They are especially visible in the design of offices. In Bringing Creative Minds Together — Coffee Point Placements at Novartis Research Facility, we see an architectural plan of one of the edifices in the new campus of Novartis in Basel which is entirely dedicated to the emplacement of “cof- how the factory floor would be used by fee points” on the different floors of the each worker. In a perfect world, none building. The plan reveals how archi- of these strings would overlap — each tecture itself is designed to respond person would have a single route, which to the need to foster collaboration and was never doubled back on, and they communication between workers in a wouldn’t overlap with those of another knowledge economy. worker. If you have machinery involved, every time these lines cross, there’s the possibility of error — or injury. You see this green guy here, he’s just fucking around, his life sucks”
In Circulation Route, Projected Teams and Total Workplace at Google Berlin, architects worked with management consultants to design flows in the workplace that would be conducive to mobility and communication between employees from different departments while creating identification within teams of workers. And finally, there is Flow Diagram of the Old Layout of a Group of Operations. These sculptures have recently been exhibited at the Jane Lombard Gallery in New York, where a young art critic visited the exhibition with a former management consultant, named Hannah. This is what Hannah had to say about this sculpture: “This is meant to visualize
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RICHARD IBGHY & MARILOU LEMMENS
ON DOCUMENTARY ABSTRACTION
Description of Artworks
EUGENIO ESPINOZA Participaciones VI, 1973 Localizaciones III, 1973 La Cosa IV, 1972 Black and White Photographs. Courtesy the artist and The Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection, Miami
human productivity from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Drawn from a wide range of disciplines, including work science, scientific management, economics, and psychology, the forms illustrate various efforts to increase efficiency through understanding the pressures on and movements of the body. The sculptures playfully subvert the authoritative nature of the originals by representing them as abstract objects, while at the same time suggesting how the aesthetics of data visualization structures perception and buttresses capitalist ideologies.
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These photographs document Espinoza’s black grid interventions, in which a large, iconically patterned cloth was incorporated into different participatory actions. Espinoza’s animation of abstraction and his literal positioning of geometric structures into the social world, is an historical referent and curatorial footnote for this exhibition.
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TORKWASE DYSON Strange Fruit (He, She), 2015 Strange Fruit (She He), 2015 Acrylic on Board. Courtesy the Artist
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TOMASHI JACKSON Grape Drink Box (Anacostia Los Angeles Topeka McKinney), 2017 Mixed media on Gauze Untitled Color (Color Study I), 2016 Acrylic Yarn and Wood. Courtesy Tilton Gallery
Strange Fruit is an ongoing series of paintings, “Color is projection, obstruction, reflection, and drawings and installations that respond to the illusion. It is subliminal and sublime.” Tomashi more than 4,000 lynchings that occurred in the Jackson’s recent works combine painting, sculpU.S. between 1877 and 1950. Dyson begins the ture, textiles, embroidery, and printmaking to works by creating an underpainting of grids, form sculptures that simultaneously reference lines, and geometric shapes onto which data the history of segregation in the US and the and her vast research from these public acts theoretical legacy of American abstraction. of torture and trauma are visualized. She then Jackson’s unique process for these works origmakes the surface visceral by overlaying dense inated with a study of transcripts from historic glossy gestures, protruding shapes, washes, and Civil Rights court cases alongside Josef Albers’ all-over gradients. Strange Fruit is a conceptual color studies. The multi-referent title of Jackson’s project that foregrounds the terror of lynching Grape Drink Box, (Anacostia Los Angeles Topeka and references how it continues to influence race McKinney) provides a key to the many past and relations and the political, social, and economic recent situations of violence and discrimination conditions of Black Americans today. layered within this body of work, and her ongoing visual scholarship that views racism through the language of abstraction. ③ RICHARD IBGHY & MARILOU LEMMENS 13 sculptures from Each Number Equals One Inhalation and One Exhalation, 2016 – ongoing Wood, thread, colored gel, and metal. Courtesy Jane Lombard Gallery Ibghy & Lemmens’ recent series Each Number Equals One Inhalation and One Exhalation comprises numerous small sculptures that are based on graphs and diagrams portraying and analyzing
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Film & Lecture Program Conversation Tomashi Jackson and Rachael Rakes Saturday, September 30, 2017 → 1 pm ArtCenter/South Florida 924 Lincoln Road, Miami Beach Conversation Rachael Rakes, Torkwase Dyson, and Maria Lind Saturday, December 09 → 10:30 am ArtCenter/South Florida 924 Lincoln Road, Miami Beach Film Program 1 A VALENCE October 22, 2017 → 7 pm followed by a conversation with artists Marilou Lemmens and Richard Ibghy. Miami Beach Cinematheque 1130 Washington Ave, Miami Beach 1 Self Portrait Tale of Two Michaels, Tomashi Jackson, 2014, 15 mins. A meditation on the recent strange and sad intersection of Michael Brown and singer Michael McDonald in the town of Ferguson, MO. 2 Occidente, Ana Vaz, 2014, 15 mins. A work of contrasts and counterpoints, Occidente layers images and conflates past and present in order to re-visualize Portuguese colonial history and its legacies. 3 Real Failure Needs no Excuse, Marilou Lemmens and Richard Ibghy, 2012, 22 mins. Consisting of a series of movements conducted in an empty office building, Real failure Needs no Excuse imagines what Lemmens and Ibghy lucidly refer to as the “transgressive potential of non-productive action and its relation to labor, work, and the imagination.” 4 Document, Coleen Fitzgibbon 1976/2011, 8:22 mins. A spinning reel of microtext film records — warrants, debts, bank checks — increasingly becomes abstracted through speed and repetition.
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Film Program 2 AN OBJECT November 7, 2017 → 7 pm Miami Beach Cinematheque 1130 Washington Ave, Miami Beach 1 As Without So Within, Manuela de Laborde, 2016, 25 mins. As Without So Within is a dreamlike study of abstract objects. Set to a minimalist soundtrack, the film maximizes the saturated colors and textures of 16mm film, creating a theatrical setting that centers on shape and materiality. 2 Around Perception, Pierre Hébert, 1968, 15 mins. "For the mind and against the mind," this groundbreaking experimental film by legendary animator Pierre Hébert is a forceful work of pure shape-driven abstraction. 3 As Water is in Water, Madison Brookshire and Tashi Wada, 2017, 31 mins. Paintings collide to produce panels of time distended with space. The picture is made from paint-soaked 16mm film strips, reinterpreted with a digital camera, edited to cycle in short, hallucinatory loops, forming eerie abstract thaumatropes. 4 1pmS011, Magdelena Fernández, 2011, 7 mins. An homage to iconic abstract artist Jesús Rafael Soto, this work animates and deconstructs his work through movement and score. Animal sounds accompany the visual unlayering of white dots found in Soto’s collage in an increasingly radical way that makes the viewer conscious of an “awakened” multisensorial experience.
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Cover Eugenio Espinoza Participaciones VI, 1973. Courtesy the artist and The Ella FontanalsCisneros Collection, Miami Rachael Rakes Natalia Zuluaga Editors
STAFF Dennis Scholl President and CEO Natalia Zuluaga Artistic Director Cherese Crockett Exhibitions & Artist Relations Manager Dan Weitendorf Facilities Manager Anais Alvarez Communications & Development Manager Angelica Arbelaez Programs Assistant Melissa Gabriel Accounting Assistant Vinny Diaz Facilities
Exhibitions and programs at ArtCenter/South Florida are made possible through grants from the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs, the Cultural Affairs Council, the Miami-Dade Mayor and Board of County Commissioners; the City of Miami Beach Cultural Arts Council; the Miami Beach Mayor and City Commissioners; and the State of Florida, Florida Department of State, Division of Cultural Affairs, the Florida Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts; and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Additional support provided by Walgreens Company. With Thanks To The Ella Fontanals-Cisneros Collection, Miami. Jane Lombard Gallery, Tilton Gallery, National Film Board of Canada, and the Miami Beach Cinematheque. Publication Credits “Each Number Equals One Inhalation and One Exhalation” is from a lecture conducted at the Beyond Measure conference, organized by ephemera journal, Stockholm University, 2017. “Black Interiority: Notes on Architecture, Infrastructure, Environmental Justice, and Abstract Drawing” was published in a previous form in Pelican Bomb on January 9, 2017.
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