The Soul Of Miami

Abe’s Penny Live: Closing Event
Saturday, April 26th, 7-10pm
Artseen Gallery
2215 NW 2nd Avenue
Miami, FL

Music by Raffa Jo
Cocktails by Hendrick’s Gin

Abe’s Penny Live was created in partnership with O, Miami, a month-long, city-wide poetry festival fully funded by the Knight Foundation.

Besides offering Miami writers the opportunity to submit poems in the context of an exhibition, throughout April Abe’s Penny Live has been the setting for readings by Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Denise Duhamel, Craig Saper, Parker Phillips, Eliza Bishop, Maggie Hasspacher, Jessica Machado, Lucia Leao, Yaddyra Peralta, Angel Cuadra, Neil de la Flor, Emma Trelles, and Maureen Seaton.

At the closing event, writers have one last chance to submit poems and vie for publication in Abe’s Penny. Works are submitted in response to photographs by Lee Materazzi, Francie Bishop Good, Samantha Salzinger, and Robby Campbell. The writing village designed by Cynthia Cruz, Nicole Doran, Patti Her, Leonardo Valencia and sleeper will be available for use.

Attila Lakatoush Miami Opening Reception
Friday May 13th 2011
Cafeina
297 NW 23 ST
Miami, Fl. 33127
cafeinamiami.com
soulofmiami.org
blessthedress.com
dolcevitaglobal.com

Cafe Society Group, Lisette Lauren Events, Dolce Vita Global, Haute In The City & Life Is Art
Present Attila Lakatoush 4 City Art Tour
Miami, Palm Beach, New York, Los Angeles

Hosted By: Elaine Lancaster, Mykel Stevens, Lisette & Lauren Maiorisi, Anton Posniak, Erin Mia Milchman, Kimberlee Etheridge

Complimentary Cocktails & Hors D’oeuvres 7pm till 9pm
RSVP: CafeSocietyGroupMia@gmail.com

The Attila Lakatoush Miami Show will run for 3 weeks in the Cafeina Gallery
For private viewings please contact Mykel Stevens at (305) 450.5154

Attila, an artistic prodigy child, received a full scholarship to the Pratt Institute at the tender age of nine. While having illustrated for designers such as Cynthia Rowley, John Richmond, Vivian Westwood and John Paul Gaultier, he brings a style and flair that is both unique and captivating. Credited with the influencing the Miami Art scene in the 90’s along with the works of artists such as Kenny Scharf, NOEL and Laurence Gartel, Attila has returned from New York for his first show in South Florida in over a decade to promote his latest limited series prints of 30’s and 40’s Hollywood Icons.

Anton Posniak, Mykel Stevens, Lisette & Lauren Maiorisi… We are a group of tastemakers with an extensive background in fashion, marketing, and business. Our mission is to promote the arts by partnering with corporate sponsors to produce high profile, media covered events while exposing the artist that we manage and represent. The venues that we use to house our events are hotels, art galleries, warehouses, restaurants, and private homes.

The mission and purpose of Café Society’s cutting edge project of the arts is to promote civic consciousness while effectively giving back to Woman’s and Children’s Charities, and Promoting both Environmentalism and the Arts within schools and communities in the areas we hold our shows, New York, Miami, Palm Beach, and Los Angeles.

Currently, we are producing a four city art tour for New York based fashion artist, Attila Lakatoush. Attila, an artistic prodigy child, received a full scholarship to the Pratt Institute at the tender age of nine. While having illustrated for designers such as Cynthia Rowley, John Richmond, Vivian Westwood and John Paul Gaultier, he brings a style and flair that is both unique and captivating. Credited with the influencing the Miami Art scene in the 90’s along with the works of artists such as Kenny Scharf, Noel Suarez and Laurence Gartel, Attila has returned from New York for his first show in South Florida in over a decade to promote his latest limited series prints of 30’s and 40’s Hollywood Icons.

With great passion, Café Society will launch the first of Attila’s Art Tour shows in Miami on May 13th 2011. With each a full production comprising an artist curated art installation along with tall beautiful models dressed in 30’s and 40’s Hollywood Glamour, Disc Jockeys and Live Entertainment. Tour shows will be produced by Lisette & Lauren Events.

You can see Attila’s work on below links

Attila Lakatoush Art Flickr Page.
Attila Lakatoush Art Facebook Group.
Attila Lakatoush Art Facebook Page.
Café Society Facebook Group.

Opening Reception: Friday April 22, 2011, 7:30 – 10 pm
Fredric Snitzer Gallery
Gallery 2247 NW 1st Place
Miami, FL 33127
Phone 305.448.8976
www.snitzer.com

Naomi Fisher, Myakka
April 22 – May 23 2011

Naomi Fisher, Myakka, P.B., SKINT, Island., 2011

The Grit in The Oyster is What Becomes A Pearl
Essay by Dean Daderko

Naomi Fisher captures her compelling images in a variety of media. Fisher trained as a painter, and she remains dedicated to the practice, making plein-air watercolors and sketches of, among other subjects, landscapes, plants and birds. She is just as adept at realizing figures and dream imagery in her studio paintings. She is also well-known for her photographs combining bodies and botany in sensual and erotic tableaux. More recently Fisher has began exhibiting semi-narrative video works that are a logical synthesis and extension of her image-making practice.

There is “Fisher, the photographer,” and “Fisher, the painter.” But perhaps the most productive way to approach her practice is to consider “Fisher, the artist.” Separating Fisher’s works by medium denies them a more productive, holistic relationship. Moreover, the varied mediums Fisher engages freely feed each other: painted canvases use film and video stills as visual references, painterly uses of color, gesture, and image cropping are evident in her camera work, and pictures come to life in her videos. These bodies of work are engaged in a compelling conversation.

A sense of wildness in Fisher’s work is cultivated in the way that one might forage through the woods or a vintage shop – a comfortable and shaggy utopia prevails throughout. The frisson in Fisher’s work comes from the way in which she comfortably combines modes and methods of representation against-the-grain. The grit in the oyster is what becomes a pearl. Myakka, P.B., SKINT, Island, 2011, is a Romantic female portrait in toned-down grays and earthy, elemental washes of color, punctuated with dashes of fluorescent paint and sparkle. A woman’s face stares out from the painting’s depths, and is overlaid with an image of a long-haired, sinewy figure who fits over her face like a puzzle piece. The image calls to mind Surrealist painting, the cut-and-paste aesthetic of punk ‘zines, and Toulouse-Lautrec in successive waves.

Though her paintings may look effortless, they are the result of exhaustive advance studies in charcoal and watercolor through which Fisher hones her vision and familiarizes herself with her subjects. Some tries are eventually discarded, but those that succeed share a sense of vision that communicates with an audience in the same way as they communicate the artist’s intent: they become convincing, autonomous images with lives of their own.

In Morning, 2010, a group of figures are gathered together in what seems to be a ritual event. Painted over an acidic yellow background in warm oranges and reds, and cool greys, lavender and leaf green, the image seems to be disintegrating in the light. The background seems to be emerging through the figures, and they’re rendered crystalline and immaterial by the effect. And for all of it’s immateriality, this image of Fisher’s comes from real life: the image itself depicts a group of the artists collaborators involved in a process of creating a world of their own.

The artist’s recent single-channel video Myakka, 2011 is the result of a 13-day long outing and collaboration with artists and friends at the Myakka State Park in Florida, where the Florida Wild and Scenic Myakka River (its real name) flows through wetlands, woodlands and prairies. Over the course of the excursion, the group lived in a community of log cabins made from felled palms, and collaborated to create and record a series of rituals, choreographies and events. The video suggests only the loosest of narratives – self-sufficiency, a movement-based practice, and group-initiations among them – while the figures in it traverse lines between being scripted characters, and just being themselves. Overlaid with a selection of witchy soundtracks of cackling voices and cracking synth by the group SKINT, the video intentionally avoids narrative conclusion, in favor of sharing with viewers a sense of the process, investigation, and exploration by which the work came into being.

Naomi Fisher’s work weaves together a scintillating and well-worn fabric from threads that include video, painting and photography. It functions like a net through which we can see the world beyond; one made that much more beautiful by its veiled framework.

The artist would like to thank Mary Christmas, Jessie Gold, Elizabeth Hart, Erin Krause, and Stella Rey for their collaboration as performers in the video, “Myakka,” which was generously supported in part by a Knight Arts Challenge grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.