Treating the city of Miami as a platform, Fringe Projects are temporary public artworks that integrate, investigate and interrogate downtown Miami’s less conventional spaces.Fringe presents three new commissions on the occasion of Art Days at scattered sites.
DARA FRIEDMAN: TEQUESTA GHOST
September 13, 7:30 pm | 108 NE 6th Street, Miami FL 33132
Above: Dara Friedman Ishmael & The Well of Ancient Mysteries, 2014. Image still, HD Video, sound, 12 minutes. On the occasion of Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, “2nd People’s Biennial”
Tequesta Ghost performance followed by A ceremony at the Well of Ancient Mysteries, hosted by Ishmael Golden Eagle at home, 87 SW 11th Street.
In light of the recent archaeological uncovering and subsequent burial of the ancient city of the Tequesta natives, the original inhabitants of downtown Miami, Dara Friedman will host a performance with the artists Lizzi Bougatsos, Sadie Laska and Ana Mendez. The performance will be filmically documented for an expanded cinema and live action installation of the same title, the exhibition of which is still to be determined. Bougatsos and Laska will perform on tandem drum kits and Mendez will dance.
The American Indians, the Natives, see the mother drum, all drums as being the heartbeat of the earth. Mother earth, naturally. The lyrics sometimes describe her contours-undulating up and down as she does. The dancer dances for those who are no longer able to dance. The relationship between the drums and the dancer is playful and competitive.
ABOUT DARA FRIEDMAN
Dara Friedman was born in Bad Kreuznach, Germany in 1968. She lives in Miami, Florida. Friedman’s work has been the subject of one-person exhibitions at venues such as Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2013); Detroit Museum of Contemporary Art (2014); Miami Art Museum, Miami, Florida (2012); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2010); Julia Stoschek Collection, Düsseldorf (2009); The Kitchen, New York (2005); Site Santa Fe, Santa Fe (2001); and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York (2014, 2011, 2008). Her work has been featured in thematic exhibitions internationally including Damage Control, Art and Destruction Since 1950, Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.(2013); Greater New York, PS1, Long Island City (2010); Off the Wall, Part 1- 30 Performative Actions, Whitney Museum of American Art (2009);Playing the City, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, Germany (2009); As Heavy as the Heavens– Transformation of Gravity, Cultural City of Europe, Graz, Austria (2003); Videodrome II, New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2002); and Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2000).
DAVID BROOKS: A DAY IN THE LIFE OF THE CORAL (as seen near Brewster Reef)
September 2015 – January 2016 | Museum Park 1075 Biscayne Blvd Miami, FL 33132
New York-based artist David Brooks investigates how cultural concerns cannot be divorced from the natural world while also questioning the terms under which nature is perceived and utilized. Having spent many years exploring the watery wildernesses of South Florida, Brooks has come to see the region as one of the most prescient testing grounds in understanding a society’s relationship to the built and natural environment.
On the occasion of this public commission, the artist spent a consecutive number of days documenting portions of the barrier and patch reefs in close proximity to downtown Miami. Through the use of large layered billboards that post the daily goings-ons of the reefs Brooks visited, he treats the billboard as a device in the service of journalism. Here the monumentally scaled imagery presents 3 actual moments in time for the coral, including evidence of their now common bleaching phases due to deterioration in water quality and intensified warming – alongside their formal beauty and dwindling biodiversity from human impact.
The billboards might appear to the viewer as incomplete or damaged, as large circular areas of the structure have been extracted. The deleterious impact the circular cutouts have on the images make them that much more difficult to interpret – analogous to the stresses society imposes upon other life within our environs, regardless of our inabilities to perceive them as such.
ABOUT DAVID BROOKS
David Brooks (b. 1975 Brazil, Indiana) has exhibited at the Dallas Contemporary (2010); Tang Museum, NY (2014); Nouveau Musée National de Monaco (2011); Sculpture Center, NYC (2010); Miami Art Museum (2011); Changwon Sculpture Biennale, South Korea (2012); The Visual Arts Center, Austin (2014); the Goethe-Institut, NYC (2014); and MoMA/PS1 where he had a large scale installation for two years (2010-12). In 2011- 12 Brooks opened Desert Rooftops in Times Square, a 5000 SQ.ft. urban earthwork commissioned by the Art Production Fund. Other major commissions include the Cass Sculpture Foundation, UK (2012) and Storm King Art Center, NY (2013); and recent exhibitions at the deCordova Museum, MA (2014); and the Nevada Museum of Art (2014); with a major upcoming exhibition at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, CT (2016). Brooks received his BFA from the Cooper Union and an MFA from Columbia University, and he currently is on the faculty at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore. He lives and works in New York City.
NATE PAGE: LIMO
September 2015 – January 2016 | 227 NE 2nd Street Miami, FL 3313
Above: Ant Farm, Cadillac Ranch, 1974-1994. Image still, Color video, sound, 16:40 minutes.
Known for architectural scale interventions that unsettle the functionality of quotidian infrastructure, Los Angeles-based artist Nate Page will create a dramatic temporary intervention into the urban fabric of Miami’s downtown in response to its burgeoning skyline and rapid pace of development.
By partially burying a limousine in the ground with the front fender facing the sky, Page references the 1974 public artwork Cadillac Ranch by the collaborative Ant Farm. Engaging in ideas of luxury and problematizing notions surrounding the American dream, Limo is further contextualized in light of Miami’s frenetic building boom and mythology of excess. Situated in a vacant plot of prime real estate, which will soon be transformed, the intervention challenges viewers to consider their context and expectations.
ABOUT NATE PAGE
Nate Page was born in 1976 in Milwaukee WI and lives in Los Angeles. He received his MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in 2008. Within Page’s practice architecture is used as a rubric for altering the viewers’ perceptions of the space they inhabit. He has worked closely with Machine Project to create architectural interventions at the Los Angeles Museum of Art (LACMA); and most recently in 2014 at the Gamble House designed by Greene & Greene in Pasadena as part of the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A. Page also inverted Machine Project’s home base; creating public space where there once was private. While many of Page’s interventions happen within the formal art viewing context, his disruptions sometimes spill out into his every day. In #nodoors, in which Page removed two front doors from his Toyota Corolla and tracked responses on Instagram for four months.
Fringe ProjectLocations
Fringe Projects is made possible by the Miami Downtown Development Authority for DWNTWN Art Days and Miami-Dade County Art in Public Places. Support for Fringe Projects is provided by Cannonball through its WaveMaker Grants program, which is part of the Andy Warhol Foundation’s Regional Regranting Program. WaveMaker Grants is supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs.
