Public art can be disappointing, often displeasing and unrefined. Fret not, with some help from the City of Miami Beach, the Bass Museum of Art has curated an art program tc: temporary contemporary to bring artwork, which would make any Miamian proud, to the city’s unexpected places. Imagine walking through a lush tropical garden on a perfect, sun shining, not a dark cloud in the sky, palm-breezy Miami day. Not just any garden, but a magical garden of memories and dreams evoking an alternate dimension. Sounds like a great sequence out of a Lynchian surrealist film, but it’s the idea behind the current tc: temporary contemporary public art installation, Pleasure, Fear, and the Pursuit of Happiness, now showing at the Miami Beach Botanical Garden.
Pleasure, Fear & the Pursuit of Happiness
The Miami Beach Botanical Garden install by ArtCenter’s Nayda Collazo-Llorens explores human perception and memory process by creating textual noise via text bubbles placed throughout the garden’s walkways. The text functions as a collection of disparate voices, private thoughts and recollections by Miami Beach locals and visitors, both real or constructed for poetic interpretation.
“Through it, I continue to explore the way in which we perceive and process information, dealing with concepts of navigation, language, displacement, memory & noise”
These textual musings constellate a path for visitors through and around the urban garden’s mangroves, water gardens, pond apple-tree, and Japanese garden.
Matthew Deleget: Shuffle
“Seemingly disparate forms of creative output: minimalist painting and salsa music. To determine the title, color palette, and composition for each painting, Deleget used the random Shuffle feature on his iPod and a playlist of songs by the salsa supergroup Fania All Stars.”
T. Kelly Mason re: Members
“Mason allows the wandering of the human mind to play across the pages of the primary tool most museums use to communicate to their members—the magazine—showing how each bit of information the staff delivers is but a piece in the puzzle of global cultural meaning.”
Micheal Linares: Así las cosas
“Through a wide range of styles and media, my work reflects my determination to constantly review and question the possibilities of new relations between things and their meanings. I consider my practice to be a constant inquiry about what is considered art through its materiality, process and its relation with other objects, as well as language, people and situations. More than an aesthetic experience itself that fades the minute it’s institutionalized, I see my work as the vehicle for a possible aesthetic experience, one that remains open, ever changing and ready to be redefined.”
Kevin Arrow x Holly Hunt: Gianni Versace
Soundtrack: HARRY PUSSY, Untitled (aka Nose Ring) (1993, Esync) 7″ here
The often loud, violent and sexually charged music of Harry Pussy is still well-regarded and highly influential in the noise rock scene. The short film Gianni Versace is an exercise is uniting two disparate audio-visual sources: the visual noise of the demolition ball striking a landmark piece of Miami Beach architecture-and all the act entails-with the historic recording of a seminal Miami Beach rock band, whose metallic noise creates movement in music.
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Jason Hedges: Key Biscayne #1
“For the past 13 years my aesthetic and conceptual concerns have been exploring formal ideals of art and foodstuffs in relation to those who make them. These questions explore fundamentals of aesthetics and humanity. Formally they have taken numerous elements from the history of art and existence. From the machined hard-edged minimal sculptures of Judd and Andre to pigment sprayed hand prints of Neolithic caver painters, I find myself combining these aesthetics with the universal constant of the food and drink we all share. By distilling down and blending these objects and ingredients to their simplest form and recontextualizing them from their known format we can distance ourselves from them and view them with a refreshed perspective devoid of superficial or commercial pretenses.”
Reception: Friday, June, 19, 6-7pm Location: Bass Museum Terrace
tc: temporary contemporary is a city-wide temporary, public art program initiated by the Bass Museum of Art in partnership with the City of Miami Beach. This program seeks to activate the urban landscape with art, surprising and engaging residents, visitors and passers-by with outdoor works of art in unexpected places. Sculpture, murals, sound installations, video and other interactive works of art, will interrupt people’s daily routines and encourage thoughtful interactions with the city and its communities. Public art becomes a catalyst to appreciate the unique character of Miami Beach from the Art Deco façade of the Bass Museum to Frank Gehry’s New World Symphony, to the busy streets and boardwalk and the spaces in between. tc: temporary contemporary is an ongoing project, as works of art explore interactions and relationships: to an environment, to a site and to each other. This general theme includes the nuances of communication and interactivity, as well as our physical relationship to architecture. The topography of the city will be pointed to, redrawn and redefined by some projects. Others will convey a sense of surprise via displacement, where seemingly common objects in public space are not what they appear. A number of projects are designed to promote new, vibrant meeting places for social interactions in the community. On occasion, groupings of works will be presented as exhibitions within tc: temporary contemporary. The first such project was developed for Art Public 2012 by guest curator Christine Y. Kim, Associate Curator of Contemporary Art at LACMA (The Los Angeles County Museum of Art) and Co-Founder of LAND (Los Angeles Nomadic Division). A selection of the works included in the exhibition – Alice Aycock, Lourival Jose Davila, Mark Hagen, Teresa Margolles, Jaume Plensa, Randy Polumbo and Ugo Rondinone – remained onsite and became part of the tc: temporary contemporary program.