Rip Van Winkle Reporting for Duty

Back from a long nap at Kaaterskill Falls.  Anything i should know?

new is the swamp

Flood the Swamp.

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Thespian Month @ swampspace

It's Thespian Month!

 

Swampspace is pleased to host 

La Noche i.Delicatissima

by Southernmost Situations

An adaptation of The Night of the Iguana by Tennessee Williams

Directed by Liz Ferrer and Sebastian Duncan­Portuondo, la noche i.delicatissimafeatures a cast of local artists, dancers, and musicians, moving the play from its original 1940s Mexican setting to a dreamlike 1960s Cuba.

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What's in a Name

Swampspace Gallery

is at a loss for words in

presenting 

Presque Vu 

by

Maitejosune Urrechaga

Opening May 11   3 - 10 pm

Yes, No or I Don't Know Why, are common responses to questions. When the answer is " On the Tip of the Tongue", some call it "Presque Vu" or almost seen.   To experience the work of Maitejosune Urrechaga is similar in character to these psycholinguistic phenomenon.   For her solo show, Maitejosune explores through portraiture the universal experience of unconscious thoughts and impulses as yet unexplained by science or spirituality.

Audio Visual Show @ swampspace

Swampspace presents

The A/V Show - Analog in Formaldehyde

Premier Opening April 13  7-11pm 

In recognition of burgeoning spring,  The A/V Show effectively transforms Swampspace into a mythical environment conveying ideals of analog and digital in an attempt to renew understanding of established developments in electronic media through the filter of trans-generational sensibility.  The A/V Show reconsiders the progression of technology in order to formulate a discussion of innovation, its likelihood and the ever increasing pace of obsolescence.

Featured participants are a selection of multi-disciplinary artists focused on the expression and analysis of audio-visual history.

Kevin Arrow

Cristy Alma

Gina Cunningham

Juan Maristany

Coral Morphologic

David Rohn

Barron Sherer

Carmen Tiffany

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150 NE 42 St. Miami Design District

blogger legend signs-off

For nearly decade the South Florida Daily Blog has been a mainstay of connectedness for a homely base of internet publishers and their mélange of readers residing in the swamp and beyond.  As the title suggests and with startling regularity the SFDB delivered daily comprehensive relevant analysis reflecting an anthropologic view of our strengths and weaknesses.  Furthermore the SFDB did a spanking job of watching the watchers in daily sifts of the mainstream media.  For those who favor the fun stuff, SFDB covered an encyclopedia of topics, from music to manure and sports to spaghetti.  One might say surely there is an office filled with geeks somewhere in Broward but the truth is the SFDB was the work of just one person with a near socratic understanding of how to best serve the swamp.

Congratulations to Rick.  

Take a well deserved respite from them darn computers.  

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another swampy opening Feb 9

Swampspace Presents

La Maison du Désir/The House of Desire:

Lea Nickless & Conrad Hamather

Opening Reception Feb 9   6-10

Open Feb 9 - March 9

150 NE 42 Street, Miami Design District

The Industrial Revolution generated a dialogue between artist and technology that continues in La Maison du Désir/The House of Desire, a collaborative installation by artists Lea Nickless and Conrad Hamather.  A pop-up boutique with atelier garment collections, “glitter bomb” objects referencing the luxury goods industry, monoprints and a video time-lapse drawing continue the exchange between the digital and the body, technology and art, and the corporal and the spiritual. The exhibition also debuts an atmospheric floor by Keith Frutiger, Atlanta-based designer.  Situated at the epicenter of the Design District, an area presently being consumed by high-end luxury shops, Swampspace is the ideal venue for this exhibition where distinctions between desire and need, opulence and ease, value and worth are considered.  

About the Artists

Conrad Hamather has been creating sculpture and installation work with a discourse on body and architecture for the last two decades. A faculty member at the School of The Art Institute of Chicago, Hamather teaches in the Department of Fashion Design. 

Artist and curator Lea Nickless is interested in the unseen, the subliminal, with what is beneath the surface. She creates garments from eco-dyed silks that she patterns with leaves, seeds and windfall blossoms she collects on her daily walks. Her monoprints and a time-lapse video feature layers of pigment, shape and text.

About Swampspace

What would become of our beloved River of Grass without the water that sustains it. What would South Florida be without the arts that nourish culture and civility. Launched in 2008 from the studio of artist Oliver Sanchez in the Miami Design District, Swampspace Gallery presents monthly exhibitions of innovative talent. On the leading edge of Miami's Arts Awakening, Swampspace defines a brand that is both sophisticated and unvarnished. Ocean Drive Magazine Brett Sokol wrote " Miami's Best Kept Art Secret". Biscayne Times Anne Tschida said " Sanchez is likely the most talented and prolific Miami Artist you've never heard of." But the truth is everyone knows about Swampspace and the wizard behind the curtain. Now at a new deluxe location in the Design District, Swampspace continue to deliver cutting-edge exhibitions for arts lovers of varied lifestyles who come together and share a unique creative experience. Because it is perhaps the preeminent artist run project space in Miami, Swampspace is a recognized destination. Because it is the antithesis of commercial galleries and institutional museums, Swampspace is aptly called the Un-Gallery. Because people are thirsty for culture, they visit Swampspace like mariners to Morocco.

Post-Information Era Begins Now

Posted Tidings for 2013

I have not posted since you know when,

who knows when I'll do it again.

Not from lack of spark or desire,

but because I have caught an ire.

To vex on the state of what's swampy,

has been a grandiose thumpy.

To wax on the age of information,

has been futile retaliation.

To delve deep lucid and snarky,

has resulted in logic malarkey.

To lay bare my most secret indignation,

has been an instructive sensation.

To refrain from self adulation,

is now welcome aberration.

To continue the habit to publish,

will most certainly lead to more rubbish.

Some would be please to see swampstyle deleted,

but so long as there's new years, I won't be defeated.

Oh yes, and groogle wants me to start paying for storage...

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December @ swampspace

Swampspace presents

100 Years of Artitude  1913 - 2013  

Pataphysics for Dummies

Opening Reception December 1,  2012

6-11 

SWAMPSPACE 

  

The director of Swampspace Gallery in the Miami Design District announced today that Swampspace will present a special exhibition to coincide with Art Basel Miami Beach.  Aptly titled "100 Years of Artitude 1913-2013 Pataphysics for Dummies" the installation is a centennial celebration of the artistic development of craft and culture.  Not since the ArmoryShow of 1913 have esthetic seismographs detected such considerable tremors and creative rumblings emanating from fecund minds.   With an amalgamation of historical artifacts and the metaphysical,  Swampspace spirals into the subjectivity of experienced reality; the inseparability of past, present, and future; and the power of language as a pataphor for attitudes in art market nihilism, truth of contradictions and exceptions.  

About Swampspace

What would become of our beloved River of Grass without the water that sustains it. 

What would South Florida be without the arts that nourish culture and civility.  

Launched in 2008 from the studio of artist Oliver Sanchez, Swampspace presents monthly exhibitions of innovative talent.  On the leading edge of Miami's Arts Awakening,  Swampspace defines a brand that is both sophisticated and unvarnished.    Ocean Drive Magazine's Brett Sokol wrote " Miami's Best Kept Art Secret".  Biscayne Times Anne Tschida said " Sanchez is likely the most talented and prolific Miami Artist you've never heard of."    But the truth is everyone knows about Swampspace and the wizard behind the curtain.   Now at a new deluxe location in the Design District,   Swampspace continue to deliver cutting-edge exhibitions for arts lovers of varied lifestyles who come together and share a unique creative experience.   Because it is perhaps the preeminent artist run project space in Miami,  Swampspace is a recognized destination.    Because it is the antithesis of commercial galleries and institutional museums,   Swampspace is aptly called the Un-Gallery.   Because people are thirsty for culture, they visit Swampspace like mariners to Morocco.

December  1 - 28,  2012

Monday - Sat 11am -7pm

150 NE 42 Street    Miami, FL 33137

hoof hearted, ice melted

Say what you will, the sea level has risen.

Say what you will, graffiti is art.

Say what you will,  dirt is not cheap.

Say what you will,  why exactly is Justin Beiber artist of this year.

Say what you will, Publix fried chicken once a month won't kill you.

Say what you will, swampspace is open for business.

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Time of the Auguries

A sign can be an object, quality, or event whose presence or occurrence indicates the probable presence or occurrence of something else.  

Loaded with irony, a sign can also be a source of amusement or distress.

Signs of disconcerting hilarity are abundant in the swamp, and in the beauty salons.

For this augur, the interpretation of omens is a Sunday pastime.

I predict uniforms will be back in style and Diana Vreeland's movie will come to Miami soon.

A sign of the times is something judged to exemplify or indicate the nature or quality of a particular period, typically something unwelcome or unpleasant such as the hair loss on your head.

Signed, sealed and delivered means formally and officially agreed and in effect.

For bloggers it means hit the publish button.

Hard to ignore, signs are often notices publicly displayed giving information or instructions in a written or symbolic form, as with this political add asking you to pull the lever for Hardemon.

But a sign need not be printed words boldface on placards.  Signs are also something regarded as an indication or evidence of what is happening or going to happen, as with the cranes that tower over the swampscape.

A sign of the cross is made in blessing or prayer by tracing a cross from the forehead to the chest and to each shoulder, or in the air in the hopes that all goes well for god's chosen few, such as the new museums dwntwn.

Signs are also each of the twelve equal sections into which the zodiac is divided, named from the constellations formerly situated in each, and associated with successive periods of the year according to the position of the sun on the ecliptic.  The Design District is a Scorpio.

South Beach is a Pisces by day, a Gemini by night.

Whatever the horoscope says, the signs are clear.

South Florida and all its chipmunks will be underwater in 100 years.

But we are too busy replacing perfectly good sidewalks with some version of new and improved WTF.

This corner crossing has been people un-friendly for over a year.

A sign of abandonment, boarded windows near the ocean indicate that someone or something is not present where they should be or are expected to be.

Pigions and sea gull provide other signs of wild things to come with their tracks and droppings  adorning a gutted hotel near the ocean.

A sign of privatization of public commons, South Point in SoBe typifies action or reaction that conveys something about someone's state or experiences, particularly developers and politicians.

Public art in private places, a monumental crankshaft up ended is a metaphor for excess capital.

This contraption is another sign of perceived security, a pataphor, a gesture or action used to convey information or instructions,  such as big blubber is watching.

 

Alas, a sign can also be a miracle regarded as evidence of supernatural power.

In Swamp We Trust.

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Shoot Film Not Bullets

If the Treatise of Versalles was signed to bring an end WW1,  how in blue blazes did a Cuban Restaurant named Versalles on Calle Ocho become ground zero for a rumba beat in favor of going all out War On Cuba.

For casual readers, the backstory is the Cuban-American Saga of Disillusion that is stirred into each super-sweet coffee brewed at Versalles, disillusion woven into every idle conversations spoken in Little Havana and snapshot taken in Moral Gables. For the past 50 years in Miami the cuban political exile experience is edified in the Freedom Tower, our beacon of hope downtown. Recently beautified but still bewitched the Ellis Island of the swamp was also affectionately called Tyrone Power...

But the point of this post is to focus on the task of documenting the dynamics of conflict in past decades.  Not too long ago film was king and to get that shot a photographer had to focused on the technical craft and, of course the chemistry.  It was a messy Weegeean affair but worth the trouble as each contact sheet became the proof that only photography can deliver.  In the field of war photojournalism and cuban-american nostalgia, Jim Nickless is a celebrated guy.  

Jim Nickless gets five stars from me.  Not because he was embedded with the 'freedom fighters" of the infamous botched Bay of Pigs invasion but because he has kept a very professional and unbiased view of the Cuban Revolution.  To put it mildly Nickless today is seasoned to perfection.  The appointer chronicler of an impassioned cadre of ex-patriots,  Nickless could not go wrong having the only cameras on site at the remote jungles and training camps and beachheads of that tragic fateful honorable push to regain Cuba from the clutches of communistic castro.

The vintage photos speak for themselves, romantic in black and white, violent with the musk of bearded rebels and gunpowder.

Of great photographers and lucky ducks, I got a visit from Jim Nickless and 305 legend, Mark Diamond with ladyfriend for the 3-D Show at Swampspace Gallery.

Today the ratio of cameras to shutter-bugs is much changed from 1960. Practically everyone is a photographer a publisher and a critic.  Cameras have become so ubiquitous the only frontier left may be the outer reaches of the inner mind and its forbidden images.

Today military camps are the size of cities,  such as this fine spread somewhere in Afghanistan.

War correspondence is a circus of outrage as seen in the protests of FEMEN in eastern Europe.

Boys become warriors in the Middle East were guns sell like corn-dogs at a county fair here.

There is no place where there is no camera. But sadly there is no microphone for Pussy Riot in Moscow.

Politicos want us to think they know the One and Only Way Forward.

But for every conflict there is resolution if we take a clue from one principal of photographic truth.  Pictures lie.

Politicians give us the thumbs up and that's all very nice from behind bullet-proof glass.

But it's the ratt-tat-tat of machine guns and the glorification of war that I give a thumbs down to.

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