NAOMI FISHER

The artist has been commission to create a new site-responsive ceramic installation. Produced during her recent residency at Cerámica Suro in Guadalajara, the new work references the fecundity of Miami’s natural landscape, the richness of mythological and surrealist imagining while maintaining its foundation in the artist’s public art practice that pulls from Miami deco architecture. Specifically for the exhibition, Fisher returned to the iconic symbol of the mermaid or the water nymph as both seductive and the grotesque, hyper-sexualized dreamy and the cause of a watery death. New monstruous sea forms take shape and octopus tentacles and suckers are stylized to become decorative façade motifs. Her work is grounded in artifice and design, particularly for architectural facades, and yet the imagery, textures, colors and glazing ooze with sex, desire and repulsion.

Fisher was born and raised in Miami, where a wild and untamed tropical environment served as the backdrop to the population’s tendency toward artifice and materialistic excess. She frequently explores this culture clash in her work through the lens of feminist theory and surrealist art. Within her work, the science and politics of climate change and how we navigate the natural world is informed by a childhood going on plant collecting expeditions around the world with her botanist father. Over the past 20 years, her work has spanned painting, drawing, performance, photography, video, and site-specific installation, often in collaboration with dancers. Recently she has started accepting commissions for permanent large-scale public art projects, the first of which is a frieze that is a permanent part of the architecture of the Rose McQuillan Art Center at the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden.

YASSI MAZANDI

The artist’s process is intuitive and engages with our energetic connections to natural elements in her work with clay, water, porcelain, and bronze. ‘Wand, to get rid of crap (2015)’ is a bronze wand, a fetish object, a ritual talisman to ‘get rid of crap’, or ward off the evil eye, keep the negative energy at bay—a precise symbol for the way that the act of creation has an inherent magic in it, the objects produced serving as symbols that have the power to transform space and experience.

Yassi Mazandi was born in Tehran, Iran, raised in Great Britain and lives and works in Los Angeles. She describes nature and her reaction to it, both conscious and subconscious, as the driving forces behind her art. She sculpts in porcelain, clay, and bronze, and also creates works on paper and canvas. Just this year she opened a large-scale site-specific public artwork at LACMA called Language of the Birds.

JEAN-HÉRARD CELEUR

On view in the exhibition are a collection of figures called ‘Zwazo’ meaning ‘bird’ in Haitian creole. Made from tires, wood and found metal these assemblage works resemble angels or spirits, worry dolls of sorts. They feel like messengers from another realm or receptacles for our worries and desires. They might hold spirit or be used to invoke or pray. These contemporary totems, markers of people and time are objects for ritual and memory.

Jean-Hérard Celeur’s sculptures present hybrids of humanoid birds in war-like attire. Often made from found wood or car tires, his sculptures reclaim and repurpose discarded materials and the associations they carry, underlining the widespread poverty that surrounds Celeur in Haiti and the ensuing need to use all available resources to denounce it. “My work has social and intellectual aspects, and represents the people’s demands for change,” explains Celeur. “I live in the reality that deals with poverty every day.” In his studio, a standing mermaid sporting a wired hat expresses gestures of political and artistic resistance as well as a desire to bring together the divine figure with the poverty and scarcity prevalent in Haiti. Death and life, sex and celebration, violence and excess, politics, and sociological concerns, encounter each other in Celeur’s works.

MARINA ABRAMOVIĆ

‘Spirit Cooking (1997)’ and ‘Cleaning the Body (1995)’, both from the collection of Beth Rudin DeWoody; and ‘Places of Power, Waterfall (2013)’ from the collection of Renee Gans will all be on view. ‘Spirit Cooking’ and ‘Cleaning the body’ are both prime examples of the artist’s work with ritual objects and ritual action as part of the artistic and creative process. ‘Spirit Cooking’ includes a blown glass jug with amethyst crystals and instructions for how to drink the water. This kind of recipe for ritual is an invitation for the public to sanctify the mundane actions of our lives and engagement with spirit. Similarly, ‘Cleaning the Body’ takes the form of hard bristle brush or broom of sorts but instead of hair or fiber, the mechanism for cleaning are laser quartz crystals. The object itself might adorn an altar or mark a sacred space, but there is humor in its utility as a brush-- that we might be invited to cleanse brush our bodies energetically just as we would use a washcloth or detangle our hair.

Abramović has pioneered the use of performance as a visual art form. The body has been both her subject and medium. Exploring the physical and mental limits of her being, she has withstood pain, exhaustion, and danger in the quest for emotional and spiritual transformation. As a vital member of the generation of pioneering performance artists that includes Bruce Nauman, Vito Acconci and Chris Burden, Abramović created some of the most historic early performance pieces and continues to make important durational works. Her work has also been included in many large-scale international exhibitions including the Venice Biennale (1976 and 1997) and Documenta VI, VII and IX, Kassel, Germany (1977, 1982 and 1992).  She was awarded the Golden Lion for Best Artist at the 1997 Venice Biennale or her video installation and performance ‘Balkan Baroque (1997)’, in which she hand-washed 1,500 cattle bones. Between 1976 and 1988, Abramović collaborated with German photographer and performance artist Ulay. She was the subject of a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, ‘The Artist is Present’, in which visitors sat across from Abramović in silent communion.

Abramović founded the Marina Abramović Institute (MAI), a platform for immaterial and long durational work to create new possibilities for collaboration among thinkers of all fields.

ALISON BLICKLE

Her latest work ‘Heaven / Hell Infinity Pools (2022)’ created for this exhibition, features a woman in a glowing dreamscape taking a selfie in what might be a bathroom mirror but instead feels hallucinatory and dizzying, neon sigils float around the frame—symbols that seem to allude to a secret language; while ripples of heavenly and diabolical  pool around the central figure and reflect across her iPhone case – a mash up that seems to suggest that the sensual and narcissistic live in tandem, that along with the worst tendencies of our digital lives we may also maintain deep wells of ancient knowledge.

Alison Blickle paints sensual oil paintings on canvas of women, usually naked or partially clothed, who marry elements of classical portraiture and landscape painting with a modern sensibility. Her subject sometimes looks away from the viewer, in transcendental paintings of man in awe of nature. Otherwise, women face the viewer with their classic beauty, framed by succulent landscapes, in warm or dark tones. Her most recent body of work ‘Medusa’ reclaims ancient myths and reimagines them in modern day Los Angeles. The series features strong women protagonists, flipping the tale of a monstruous Medusa on its head and reclaiming the feminine sexuality and power of this origin story.