November 29— December 11, 2022
The exhibition 'Boil, Toil & Trouble' included 46 contemporary artists working in a range of media who explore mystical, mythological, or spiritual frameworks and practices as they pertain to water. Artists selected have created works that deal with magic, ritual, and the role of the ‘witch’ or medium in contemporary art.
In addition to a series of new works, site-specific commissions, and large-scale installations, significant historic works were on loan from the private collections of Beth Rudin DeWoody, Craig Robins, Priscila & Alvin Hudgins, and Renee Gans.
Curated by Zoe Lukov
Produced by Abby Pucker
OPENING PRESENTED BY PALM HEIGHTS
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
39 NE 39th Street
Miami Design District
Abraham Cruzvillegas, Alison Blickle, Ana Mendieta, April Gornik, Ariana Papademetropoulos, Armani Howard, Astrid Terrazas, Bony Ramirez, Bruce Nauman, Cannupa Hanska Luger, Chase Hall, Chelsea Culprit, Dalton Gata, David Hammons, Edgar Arceneaux, Fawn Rogers, Frank Walter, Frantz Zephirin, Guadalupe Maravilla, Henry Chapman, Hiba Schahbaz, James Casebere, Jamilah Sabur, Jean Herard Celeur, Jillian Mayer, Julian Charrière, Lezley Saar, Loni Johnson, Marina Abramović, Maya Lin, Michael Ajerman, Myrlande Constant, Naomi Fisher, Nereida Patricia, Nicole Eisenman, Nicolette Mishkan, Niki De Saint Phalle, Paulo Pjota, Radcliffe Bailey, Ricardo Partida, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Robert Nava, Superflex, Torkwase Dyson, Wangechi Mutu, and Yassi Mazandi.
Thank you Beth DeWoody, Craig Robins & Miami Design District, Renee Gans, and Priscila Hudgins for your generous support.
EXPLORE ARTISTS BY ROOM
RECEPTION ROOM
ROOM ONE
ROOM TWO
ROOM THREE
BACKROOM
21 NE 39TH
Boil, Toil & Trouble — with a nod to the warning chanted by the witches in Shakespeare's Macbeth — is a bubbling cauldron overflowing with gods and monsters, spirit and transcendence. It plumbs our most vile depths and elevates our gasping, grasping survival. This show is a stew with the power to burn and poison, but also to heal and alchemize.
Magic, spiritual practice and ritual underpin this exhibition, uniting artists who are witches, makers of totems and practitioners of ceremonies. We reclaim the archetype of the witch — once hunted and bound at the stake — and acknowledge her as diviner, conjurer, healer and medium. Artists channel the divine, and in this case, water is God. Omnipresent and vital for life, it transforms seamlessly between material states, from solid to liquid to vapor and back again, encircling and surrounding and sustaining. It cleanses, baptizes, and regenerates. But it also penetrates and erodes. It is both life source and a watery grave— what lies beneath is at once terrifying and life affirming.
Artists in the exhibition explore both the mundane and the mythological aspects of water – from the labor and rituals that we practice within it, to the origin stories that help us make sense of its raw and consuming power. There is healing and violence, sanctity and profanity, terror and hope — a porous boundary between the spirit realm and the living.
A multitude of sea forms (both real and imagined) are part of our cultural consciousness. Yemaya — the West African orisha of the ocean — and La Siren (her Haitian counterpart) are all-powerful goddesses often represented as mermaids. Half human, half fish, the mermaid is a repository for our most intimate desires and existential anxieties about the femme body. Yet her imagined hybridity also points towards our own future expansiveness and potential.
Water is the great connector – the site of conquest and adventure, of “discovery” and forced diasporas, of migration, brutality, escape, and ultimately: refuge. Its depths are the realm of nameless ancestors, those we have lost, those who haven't made it.
Boil, Toil & Trouble scavenges and scrounges those depths, regenerating and cleansing them in the process. This is a gathering of curanderas, a limpieza.
We are at a boiling point, and it may take a witches’ brew to save us.
– Zoe Lukov, curator.