Mapping Gay Marriage, Consumption and Audiences at ArtCenter – Exhibit Opens
Friday, February 24 at 7:00 p.m.
ArtCenter
800 Lincoln Road
Miami Beach
305.674.8278
www.artcentersf.org.
the opening reception is free and open to the public

ArtCenter/South Florida presents Mapping: Time and Space, a group exhibition that redefines ‘the map’ as a philosophical gateway to sex, consumption, growth and communication. Interested in experimental ways of conceptualizing the map, artists Jake Margolin and Nick Vaughn, Rosa Naday Garmendia, Regina Jestrow, Lucinda Linderman, Amanda Serrano and Carrie Sieh rethink the utilitarian object as it relates to their own personal journeys.

“We are so very pleased to have Lauren Wagner, Director of Exhibitions at Bakehouse Art Complex, curating Mapping,” said Maria Del Valle, ACSF Executive Director. “ArtCenter has a long history of partnering with some of the brightest and most innovative organizations. We look forward to continuing this tradition with this show, which puts the spotlight on both BAC and ACSF artists-in-residence.”

“Both Bakehouse Art Complex and ArtCenter/South Florida were essentially born of the same blood in the 1980s, and these types of cross-institutional projects help bridge the gap between the two,” said Wagner of BAC. “In Mapping, our intentions are to provide alternative ways of thinking about and creating the map, therefore it was important to me to reach beyond the walls of BAC and ACSF. I am also honored to be working with Lucinda Linderman and the collaborative team of Jake Margolin and Nick Vaughn.”

While maps have traditionally been used to understand a physical place, Mapping: Time and Space explores mapping as it applies to temporal and internal space. Found maps are the basis of Margolin and Vaughan’s multimedia collaborations, which observe the artists’ travel through the United States, their own personal sexualities and the state’s acceptance of same-sex marriages. Layering personal, political and historical documents over preexisting road maps, and cutting-out everything within those images except for roadways and waterways, their piece is inspired by anatomical dissections of human vascular systems. By leaving only the intricate lace-paper of roads and rivers, a vascular system of familiar geographies – and the delicacy and integrity of those systems – are revealed in the work.

Serrano also makes use of found maps with oversized ‘National Geographic Historical Atlas’ diagrams. The artist creates an abstract interpretation of a topographical map based on the fragility of her medium and the earth she depicts.

Linderman’s sculptures consider the body and its functions as forms for mapping the consumption of goods over time. One of her pieces intended for Mapping is a timeline of the artist’s own experience, fueled by the digestive system. Building her work over several months from tail to mouth, it shows the consumer products that she purchased in chronological order, the most recent at the head of the sculpture and the oldest at the extremity.

Also touching upon issues of consumption, Garmendi’s ‘I Am Just Like YOU!’ is part of a larger body of work developed with materials of a wasteful society. Her art is inspired by her daily experience of living in a fragmented and convulsive community: Miami as both rich in its cultural diversity and severely fragmented. Conceptually, Garmendi’s piece evokes personal and universal feelings of alienation.

Sieh has created an interactive installation and performance drawing on imagery, based on the history of ideas about the brain and the mind. This idea developed out of the artist’s own interest in neurology and psychoanalysis, and her fascination with the evolution of scientific and popular ideas about the mind, behavior and personality traits. By asking the public to participate in the installation, Sieh will create a platform to map the transmission of information between multiple spaces: the internal, psychological spaces of the participants and herself, and the external space of communication between them.

Fiber artist Jestrow maps her own life and development as a professional artist through ‘New Foundations’, a quilt whose underpinnings consist of her mother’s old dress patterns. Through the history of this piece and its own travel, Jestrow continues to weave a narrative path for her own growth and maturity in her craft.
Mapping: Time and Space will be on view at ArtCenter/South Florida until April 1, 2012.

Image: Nick Vaughan and Jake Margolin, Double Self Portrait: Pennsylvania (detail), 2010