Satellite Miami Closes the Decade   

MIAMI - Despite the recession’s hit on smaller Miami fairs this year, with Verge at the Catalina down to only 14 rooms, no Bridge Wynwood and Scope mostly too slick for an extended foray, the city played unfazed, with thousands circulating through the still splashy December art week.  To start, crowd pleaser Pulse, ramped up the previously uneventful NADA digs, the Ice Palace, adding exotic entrance, outdoor café and other festive touches. Hitting stride immediately, at Andrew Rafacz, ethnically-charged, ink and acrylic primitive forms by Cody Hudson insinuated the artist’s conflicting feelings of bliss and despondency over free-floating, impending doom.  More oblique, complex, and in flux than Hudson’s other single organism drawings, the blue Ultraworld Redux invoked the fragile inter-workings of a sensitive psyche or odd coded nature in a genial but unknown realm.

Then Winkleman Gallery scored the touchdown at this venue.  With four capacious panes demarcated by a taut cross section of graphic stripes, Rory Donaldson’s Sqescape10 opened photography out onto new vistas.

Here with five or six dimensions of space evoked simultaneously, the work was both fast and slow.  In its crisp economy and spareness, Donaldson’s work felt fresh.  Insinuations of plaid, architecture, and film notwithstanding, adroit choreography of stylish formal elements drew us into multiple dreamy eye wanderings.  Nocturnal dusk, and still inky lake water at midnight not invoked, there emerged an equally placid more inner-mind nature.           

Also at Winkleman, on another stylized note, Eve Sussman’s iconic Red Girls Blue Girls spoke tacit volumes on particular intrinsic female roles and psychology.

In the plodding speed of an Antonioni film, like the posts and planes of the country club architecture, which filled in as both additional actors and metaphor, the blasé passive states of the socialites emanated an elusive ambiguity hovering between presence and absence.

Without doubt, this year, NADA won the Fabulous Venue award.  From double arch panache of front entrance to capacious tiered lobby, the retro glam of the grande dame Deauville Beach Resort gave tingly anticipation to what would appear through the doors.  Unfortunately, some of the NADA fare lacked the luster of the hotel.  However, at Thomas Solomon Gallery, Bart Esposito, proved an exception.

Esposito’s Untitled (fuschia) 2009,  married graphic hard-edge acrylic and silken pastel.  The stained-glass-like acrylic wedges, morphing between two and three dimensions, forged a compelling punchy trellis atop a more organic red pastel sea. Tainting minimalism with forbidden flair, Esposito made some successful renovations on painting.

Next, with the charming beloved Aqua Hotel fair in the psycho dustbin of greedy owners,  Aqua Wynwood tried to stand in for both venues with mixed results.  Overall, one yearned for more stand out work.  A highlight was at Miller Block where Imi Hwangbo intrigued with sunken relief based on pojagi, Korean traditional fancy wrapping fabric. Descending from pristine smooth plastic-y surface, the strata of stepped miniature canyons in each flower made palpable the intricate lines of textile design.   References drifted from labor-intensive but meditative handicraft to Confucian restriction of female autonomy/individuality. 

Otherwise, beyond the art fair circuit, other curatorial menus abounded.  ArtViceroy, organized by curator Renee Vara at the swank Viceroy Hotel’s unfinished ICON condos, served up a scenic 57-room floor of edgy sculpture, paper, and canvas work.  The installation, screenings, and performances of Jared Whitham, curated by Rupert Ravens Contemporary, made for an off the wall circus. 

Finallly, Art and Culture Center of Hollywood lampooned the over-value and pretense of academic highbrow art, wittily recasting it as wall decoration and backdrop.  Her whimsical olio of pop elements, pared-down logo utterances, interior design patterning, post-Matisse flipping between 2 and 3D space, and injection of a pseudo-advertising, grandstanding voice in comic book bubbles, set her in the sphere of painting innovators such as Barry McGee, Margaret Kilgallen and Polly Apfelbaum.

Week of sunny expectations over, some dealers packed up without having covered expenses. That said, Scope dealer John Pollard of ADA gallery (Richmond, VA.) pointed out that the art fair can be seen as an “expensive meet and greet”—$12,000 expensive, as a matter of fact.  In truth, he continued, “My artists are likely making more than I am, but how else is unknown artist, shown by unknown guy in unknown city going to connect with these collectors?”