JAMES CASEBERE

‘Nalu (White) (2018)’ features a majestic futuristic contemporary house emerging from tranquil reflective waters. The ominous future ruin seems grows out the sea—a dystopian vision after the deluge while the quiet bright white architecture devoid of life or human activity stands testament to what was once human creation and civilization.

James Casebere’s pioneering work has established him at the forefront of artists working with constructed photography. Over the past forty years, Casebere has devised increasingly complex models and photographed them in his studio, creating photographic tableaux that subtly lay bare their own devices to inhabit the gap between abstraction and image, painting and photography. Casebere’s works have progressively depicted a wider perspective: the surrealist domestic scenes and claustrophobic vistas of his early pieces gave way to hauntingly evocative architectural interiors and exteriors of building typologies found both in the United States and the Middle East, while his ‘Duchess County series’ (begun in 2009 and still ongoing) takes an aerial perspective of an entirely made-up, though acutely plausible community. Creating simulacra that revise and usurp reality to expose what art historian Hal Foster considers “a psychopathology of everyday life”, Casebere’s scenes are profoundly ambiguous yet politically pointed, chronicling our times through images of unpeopled spaces and landscapes that convey a deep disquiet.

JILLIAN MAYER

Commissioned to create a large-scale site-specific sculpture for the exhibition, Jillian Mayer appropriated a discarded jet ski. It was created to function in the outside world to assist man in gliding over water, and conquering nature. It assists man in crossing bodies of water at high speeds and can be used recreationally or for transportation until it no longer functions. Here, Mayer repurposes a jet ski as an art object by transforming it into a sculpture and reappropriating it from its fate or becoming another human relic of obsolescence.

With wry humor, Jillian Mayer (Miami, b. 1984) explores identity in the Internet age and the slippery divide between reality and virtual reality, in drawings, photographs, installations, performances, videos, and “meta-pop music” collective, #PostModem. Ubiquitous social media platforms like YouTube and Twitter are integral to her work, in which she adopts the look and tone of viral videos—including her own Internet sensation, ‘I Am Your Grandma (2011)’, an absurdist music video in which she addresses her future grandchildren, promising to love and nurture them as a digital simulacrum—as well as online chat boards, and the streams of pablum appended to everything. The mindless appearance of Mayer’s work belies the fraught questions underlying them, about the relationship between humans and technology. In recent years, Mayer's interest has shifted from exploring technologically intertwined with life/living to imagining its absence and what that looks and feels like. Mayer has developed a new body of work inspired by survivalist communities, with a particular focus on how class and privilege function in apocalyptic or near-apocalyptic conditions. Is an off-grid lifestyle a privilege or the only option? Is it more economically viable to live in a city within community planning or in nature? Where do leisure, access, and privilege overlap and what does the role of art play in this scenario?

SUPERFLEX

The work on view in the exhibition ‘Boil the Ocean’ asks us to imagine what happens and how we act now that we are at the boiling point –besides the destruction of mankind, what might be birthed from the boiling seas?

SUPERFLEX was founded in 1993 by Jakob Fenger, Bjørnstjerne Christiansen, and Rasmus Rosengren Nielsen. Conceived as an expanded collective, SUPERFLEX has consistently worked with a wide variety of collaborators, from gardeners to engineers to audience members. Engaging with alternative models for the creation of social and economic organization, works have taken the form of energy systems, beverages, sculptures, copies, hypnosis sessions, infrastructure, paintings, plant nurseries, contracts, and public spaces. Working in and outside the physical location of the exhibition space, SUPERFLEX has been engaged in major public space projects since their award-winning ‘Superkilen’ opened in 2011. These projects often involve participation, involving the input of local communities, specialists, and children. Taking the idea of collaboration even further, recent works have involved soliciting the participation of other species. SUPERFLEX has been developing a new kind of urbanism that includes the perspectives of plants and animals, aiming to move society towards interspecies living. For SUPERFLEX, the best idea might come from a fish. Many of the most recent SUPERFLEX projects have been engaging with the impending climate disaster and the destruction of the environment as we know it. Humans have roamed this planet for a mere 300,000 years – less than 0.01 % of the Earth’s history. During our relatively short stay, we have managed to create a footprint on the entire ecosystem comparable to that of major natural disasters such as volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and meteor impacts.

In anticipation of a future altered by climate change, SUPERFLEX created ‘Dive-In’, an encounter across time, elements, and species, constructing an architectural vocabulary fit for a new era of submersion – in preparation of a mass migration from the sea to the land—an era of fish. In other works, the collective engages with a dystopian future that seems to approach as the end of the human era draws nearer. Even as large areas of land are submerged by rising seas, Earth has transgressed limits and redefined itself again and again and will most likely do so in a post-human era. As part of these investigations, SUPERFLEX created a series of light works reminiscent of the commercial signage frequently found in urban landscapes and generally located on the tops of façades or buildings, ‘We Are All In The Same Boat’, ‘Come Hell’ or ‘High Water’, ‘Boil the Ocean’ and others. The artists translate a familiar phrase into a text-based installation, consisting of an illuminated signboard made with ocean-blue or magna-red LED letters mounted on an aluminum frame.  These works invite the viewer to reflect upon our present role in the escalation of climate change, to acknowledge our communal and shared experience within this reality, consider a potentially apocalyptic scenario, and eventually imagine a future world. The epoch where we took center stage – the Anthropocene – is coming to an end, but other species will take the spotlight and inhabit our infrastructure once we are gone. New life will flourish, with or without us. As our surroundings are changing at an increasing pace, we seem unable to change our behavior and patterns of consumption. Perhaps our footprint on this planet has already set an inevitable course from which it is too late to deviate. Perhaps we overestimate our ability to self-preserve. Regardless, the evolution of planet Earth continue.

ARIANA PAPEDEMETROPOLOUS

Her video work ‘Baby Alone in Babylon’ is featured in this exhibition which showcases the artist floating in a bed in the sea. Filmed on location in Greece, the artist wanders ungoverned at the mercy of the waves and the wind. Often drawing inspiration from the deep sea and the creatures that inhabit it, real or mythological including sea shells and fish, in this film, the artist resembles a Nereid, the sea nymph often associated with the Aegean Sea.

Ariana Papademetropolous who may be best known for her gorgeously rendered seductive oil paintings of surreal dreamscapes with unicorns, sea creatures, shells and eerie figures often plays with the absence and presence of the body in these highly evocative settings. Her work consistently utilizes imagery from the sea and the natural world, often hybridizing conch shells, snails, unicorns or crystals with elements of the human body, there is a deeply erotic sensuality to her paintings as well as a surreal use of imaginary creatures that seem to push the potential of the human body.

JULIAN CHARRIÈRE

For the exhibition, his iconic and haunting video work, ‘And Beneath it all Flows Liquid Fire’—a rococo apocalyptic vision of molten magma flowing from an elegant fountain has been installed at a larger-than-life scale. Alluding to the origins of Earth, the violence of creation and destruction as well as our current climate crisis, the boiling point where we find ourselves, the audiovisual experience envelops and overwhelms the viewer.

Charrière (Switzerland, b. 1987) is known for a research-based practice rooted in geology, biology, physics, history, and archaeology. He frequently travels to some of the most remote regions of the planet to explore how human civilization and the natural landscape are inextricably linked. Drawing on ideas about ephemerality, the passage of time, and humankind’s attempts to dominate the environment, his oeuvre incorporates extensive techniques and media, including photography, sculpture, video, intervention, and installation. Charrière currently lives and works in Berlin

CHELSEA CULPRIT

‘Tru Bruja Too (2019), on loan from the Collection of Beth Rudin DeWoody, features a flying broomstick with disembodied neon hand. The witch isn’t seen but she has been announced and is eerily present.

Chelsea Culprit’s work entangles representations of the body’s capacity for work, play, display, expression, the performed authenticity of identity, and the intractability of freedom and personal bondage. Moving freely between the pictorial imagery of folk art and the materiality of the real world, Culprit’s works are composed of feelings as much as descriptions. Working variously with painting, neon light, sculptural assemblage, and installation, her work uses a composite approach to translate the ideologies of female identity which are used to define the gender binary.

JAMILAH SABUR

For the exhibition, the artist has been commissioned to create a new public sculpture placed on the exterior façade of the building. The new turquoise neon states ‘C’est l’envers’, French for ‘It’s upside down’ or ‘Inside out’ or ‘The wrong way round’. Perhaps better said, nothing is as it seems. The phrase in Miami aqua blue, references the iconic signage and spectacle of Miami architecture but comes from a dream the artist had where a spirit or ancestor was repeating the phrase to her. She woke up speaking the message out loud and realized it was a message that needed to be transmitted and memorialized.

Metaphysics, geology, and memory are recurrent themes in the work of Jamilah Sabur (Jamaica, b. 1987). In her practice, the artist employs a distinct poetics, reframing territory, and nationality. She explores the temporary nature of existence and our fleeting presence in it, a thread that connects us all. A new planetary literacy emerges in her work, where alternate geographies become possible as submerged histories are revealed. Sabur's work has been shown at galleries and institutions such as Pérez Art Museum, Miami; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit.

NEREIDA PATRICIA

The artist was commissioned to create a new site-specific mixed-media fountain which she has been building on location during her residency at Fountainhead in Miami. The fountain made mostly from foam, cement and glass beads, references themes of diasporic mythology, trans poetics and identity and ecological collapse. With iconic imagery that points to both Damballah, the Haitian lwa often represented by a snake and understood to be the creator of all life, the scientifically modified trans body, and the detritus of the post-apocalyptic, the fountain is a primordial soup of sorts that speaks to both the scarcity of water and our birthing and creation from its source. 

Nereida Patricia is a visual artist and poet based in Chicago who has recently moved to Brooklyn, NY. Patricia’s practice spans sculpture, painting, and performance, and explores themes of mythology, trans poetics, and identity. Her work draws from postcolonial and Black feminist theory, Peruvian and Caribbean symbolism, as well as autobiographical fragments, to explore trans femininity, violence, gender, race, and sexual politics. She has studied at The New School and holds Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute Chicago. Her work has been exhibited at venues such as DUPLEX, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit; Eric Firestone Gallery, New York; Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago and more.