David Castillo Presents
Art Basel Miami Beach: Quisqueya Henriquez
David Castillo Gallery: Five Solo Shows
David Castillo Annex: Troglodytes see better in the dark
Quisqueya Henriquez
Collage Made According to the Laws of Change
Art Basel Miami Beach, Art Positions Booth P2
Collins Avenue between 21st and 22nd Street, Miami Beach
December 4 – December 7, 2008
David Castillo Gallery is proud to present Collage Made According to the Laws of Change, a solo show by Quisqueya Henriquez at Art Basel Miami Beach, Art Positions Booth P2. In dissecting a sinewy bicep or the angle of a bat against the sky from newspaper cutouts, Henriquez creates collaged figures bordering on the mythical, surreal, and grotesque. Her works display hyperbolic elements of masculinity, power, and dexterity; the object referent is replaced by a satire of the velocity of cultural stereotypes, namely fetishized abilities of Latin Americans. The individual identities of Henriquez’s characters are as distorted as the misperceptions germinated by spectators. Prompted by her Cuban- Dominican heritage, Henriquez stages an intervention of transnational honesty in aesthetics that would make George Grosz blush.
The artist’s physical hybrids also composite high art practice and a colloquial pastime. Ten collage works are based on Seurat’s Woman Singing in a Café Chantant. The shared title of her collages, Collage Made According to the Laws of Change, puns Hans Arp’s oft-utilized Collage Made According to the Laws of Chance. By evoking deliberate change rather than chance in the face of Art History, Henriquez suggests that pictorial representations contain the power to deflate as much as aggravate cultural one- dimensionality.
Henriquez transforms the Art Positions container’s interior with a site-specific installation using a textile pattern created by Danish architect Arne Jacobsen, further embedding her collage works in European Art History and contrasting the lack of infrastructure of many nations outside of the European context. Henriquez is above all a practitioner who asks her audience not only to recognize beautiful art and ugly stereotypes, but engage in creating intertextuality between brown and white, reality and propaganda, formal and informal.
After graduating from the prestigious Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana in 1992, Henriquez has exhibited throughout Latin America, Europe, and the United States. Her work is in important private and public collections including El Museo del Barrio, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, FL; Miami Art Museum; Cintas Foundation, NY; Rhode Island School of Design; and Coleccion Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, NY, among many others. The September 2007 issue of ARTnews named Henriquez one of 25 art world trendsetters. Before traveling to the Miami Art Museum, Henriquez’s mid-career retrospective at the Bronx Museum of the Arts garnered a review in the New York Times.
Five Solo Shows
Aramis Gutierrez, Glexis Novoa, Leyden Rodriguez-Casanova, Frances Trombly, Wendy Wischer
David Castillo Gallery
2234 NW 2nd Avenue, Miami
December 1, 2008 – January 3, 2009
Reception December 6, 7 – 11 pm
Concurrently with our participation at Art Basel Miami Beach, David Castillo Gallery opens two exhibitions. In the main gallery, David Castillo presents new work by gallery artists Aramis Gutierrez, Glexis Novoa, Leyden Rodriguez-Casanova, Frances Trombly, and Wendy Wischer in Five Solo Shows.
For over a decade, Wendy Wischer has camped at the intersection of solaced nature and societal technology, creating introspective works in sound, light, and sculpture. Wischer’s work, concerned with how a single set of principles can be found throughout the universe, becomes both soothing and provocative in our modern time of despair. Glexis Novoa renders cityscapes and their instruments of conflict like peering into a curio cabinet and coming face-to-horizon with societal apocalypse in miniature. His graphite drawings on marble are almost voyeuristic in their detail.
Aramis Gutierrez’s oil paintings unload personal and historic conflict on an epic scale. His storytelling equates sun blisters and love pains, labyrinthine woods and Evolutionary Psychology. Leyden Rodriguez-Casanova challenges the absoluteness of stories associated with our utilization and memory of everyday objects. Frances Trombly also retells stories of domesticity in a voice laced with feminist awareness. Trombly employs traditionally effeminate techniques to turn new scrutiny upon daily life.
Troglodytes see better in the dark
Jesse Bercowetz, Stephan Goldrajch, Andrew Guenther, The Icelandic Love Corporation, Dan Kopp, Susan Lee-Chun, Pepe Mar, Tiffany Pollack, Michael Velliquette, Jaimie Warren
David Castillo Annex
2234 NW 2nd Avenue, Miami
December 1, 2008 – January 3, 2009
Reception December 6, 7 – 11 pm
David Castillo Annex, immediately adjacent to the main gallery, announces its inaugural exhibition, Troglodytes see better in the dark, with works by Jesse Bercowetz, Stephan Goldrajch, Andrew Guenther, The Icelandic Love Corporation, Dan Kopp, Susan Lee-Chun, Pepe Mar, Tiffany Pollack, Michael Velliquette, and Jaimie Warren.
From the shadowy libido of Bercowetz’s organic assemblages, Mar’s comic nightmare scaffolding, and Velliquette’s paper creatures; within the deep space of Guenther’s aliens and the depths of Lee-Chun’s cultural identities; behind Warren’s theatrical make-up and Goldrajch’s canopic masks; with the dusk of Kopp’s neon apocalypse, the dawn of Pollack’s prehistoric vegetation, and the Nordic perspective of The Icelandic Love Corporation; down the fathoms of our subcultures and psyches live creaturely sensibilities with the night vision to transcend the modern conflict of our waking lives.
The works in Troglodytes see better in the dark possess the valor to see what less absurd beings cannot: humor, hope, community, and spirituality in socio-political darkness. Some troglodytes, such as Bercowetz’s unwieldy amalgamations cobbled together with cable and epoxy, come from chaos. Some, such as Mar’s sculptures inspired by electronic music and pop consumerism and Warren’s disguised self-portraits, come from cult culture. Some, such as Velliquette’s hand-cut paper dioramas and Lee- Chun’s bifurcated racial personas, come from the rituals of otherness. Seen together, one develops the impression that these troglodytes are social creatures, and their artists’ emphasis on crafts and craftsmanship create a valuable nostalgia for epochs when humans lived communally with nature and one another. Regardless from under which underbelly these troglodytes crawl, all are beacons of The Icelandic Love Corporation’s belief that, even in the face of nihilism, inhibitions, and the technological prowess of post-postmodernism, “love redeems us all.”
