Sunday, December 2, 2012

popUPwindGAP


Swampspace is pleased to host the windGAP,  another visiting artists situation installation.




the windGAP:
A Pop-up Situation

Miami, Florida, November 30, 2012 – Artist Frank Traynor, founder of
Brooklyn’s celebrated Perfect Nothing Catalog, has teamed up with
curator Claudia Eve Beauchesne to present the windGAP, a pop-up
situation taking place in Miami on December 3-9, 2012.

Last summer, Traynor opened The Perfect Nothing Catalog, a temporary
shop in a shack in a garden in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. The experience of
walking through a lush urban garden and into a repurposed icehouse to
find a shop full of hand-crafted design objects made the project unique,
and it was featured in New York Magazine, Time Out New York, Nylon
and Daily Candy, and included in the installation Ikea Disobedients at
MoMA PS1.

Meanwhile, Beauchesne was curating The Picture Show, a photography
exhibition taking place in the unapologetically kitsch lobby of the Brooklyn
Heights Cinema, a movie theater that will soon be demolished to make
way for condos. The historically and politically charged location was an
essential part of the group show, which became an L Magazine editors’
pick.

Traynor and Beauchesne bonded over their shared desire to subvert
conventional retail and exhibition practices, and decided to collaborate.
They envision the windGAP as a new chapter in the history of The Perfect
Nothing Catalog, with more temporary installations and joint ventures in
the coming months.

Traynor came up with the title for the project while hiking on the
Appalachian Trail: “I kept reading about these things, wind gaps, and
they struck my imagination. A wind gap is a geological formation created
when a river dries up but the earth keeps its shape. I like the idea that
what used to be about water is now about wind, which is a kind of perfect
nothing.”

the windGAP will take place under a parachute installed outside of
swampspace, a project space run by local artist Oliver Sanchez in Miami’s
Design District. The pop-up situation will feature an eclectic mix of one-of-
a-kind objects by emerging designers, artists, craftsmen and collectors,
among them Carson Fisk-Vittori, Hayden Dunham, Chen Chen & Kai
Williams, Garrett Young, Michael Bauer and Tori Kudo (aka Maher Shalal
Hash Baz).

The WindGAP
150 N.E. 41 Street, Miami, FL
December 3-9, 2012, 12-9 pm
http://theperfectnothingcatalog.com/
Facebook.com/perfectnothingcatalog




For more information, contact:
Frank Traynor: francisxaviertraynor@gmail.com

Saturday, December 1, 2012

the 100 Years Show

Visit Swampspace

Tonight Dec 1 Grand Opening

 Thurs Dec 6 Design District VIP Night

see Live Camels !




Friday, November 30, 2012

Remember November




Art conquers many things.  Like clockwork, art brings throngs of gawkers and grinders to the swamp every December.


With all the art on display at ABMB and at the myriad of satellite fairs you hope no one will notice that the sea level has indeed risen. 


But ask any of the thousands of residents from the low lying areas and the verdict is in.  The sky may be blue but so are the streets in much of South Florida.


Some say water is everything, indeed it is everywhere these days.  Certainly some clever artists will float ideas and projects based on the effects of H2 ohoh...


But Miami is still in its infancy. there is sufficient space to sprawl and or go tall.  Problem is it is mostly soggy swamp. 


No matter. Art must go on as the explosion of cultural revitalization kabooms with creativity and cash.


You know art is not the only allure here. People, mostly europeans and such from coooool places, come here for the flesh and bones of our bordello bodega ways.


And so it is that trees are planted, shops are opened, drinks are free so where you be?


I love Miami. I live the peeps and the streets. There is an I don't know what here that works overtime because people want certain things real bad.  They want 305 pride.  There is not a dry eye in the house.


But dry blight is what much art typifies, particularly publicly funded art that must jump through  flaming hoops of bureaucracy to get made so a few lowly artist can get decent food, housing and art supplies.


The power structure knows there is only so much that money can buy.  How much you are  loved by others is everyone's game.  It is the true measure of success.


Who does not love the sound of Cash.


Who does not beat heart for art.


Whoever paid big bucks for this wall sculpture has a message for you...


He and She who lives, breaths eats and shits art is probably happy on inside and out.


Art is the most powerful force.  Just ask any longtime resident of Wynwood.


Art is both big commodity and worthless mulch.


Art is a multi-disciplinary mastodon.


Art is whatever, eek.


Art is the La Rive Gauche of the swamp.


ABMB is an anthropological reality carnaval.

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Sunday, November 18, 2012

Pataphysics Show 1913-2013

Swampspace presents

100 Years of Artitude  1913 - 2013  Pataphysics for Dummies

Opening Reception December 1   6 -10 pm

December  1 - 28,  2012





Swampspace requests the pleasure of your company for a centennial celebration of artistic development in the Miami Design District.   One Hundred years since the Armory Show of 1913, esthetic seismographs have detected rumbling tremors from artists studios throughout the swamp resonating at a frequenting pace.  To mark this year's ABMB,  Swampspace delves into the subjectivity of experienced reality; the inseparability of past, present, and future; the power of language as a pataphor for amplitude in art market nihilism resting on the truth of contradictions and exceptions.





"What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art. My starting point is always a feeling of partisanship, a sense of injustice.”  
“Why I Write,” by George Orwell.





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.





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Saturday, November 3, 2012

Birth of Swampthing



Creature from the DesignDistrict


Be There or Be Somewhere Else.


Snooze You Lose, and Bring Some Booze


Back to the Od Old Nights


Big Book Don't Lie


All that Glitters is Shiny.


Obama Endorses Swampthing @ Swampspace Tonight.

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Sunday, October 21, 2012

october hodgepodgery


While Wynwood Burns

If there is to be an October surprise then let it be the five alarm fire that consumed the warehouse of Art by God just days after the Biscayne Times published an in depth article on the swamp's infamous   target for animal rights activists unhappy with the metaphysical art of collecting stuffed animals and other treasures from the wilds.


And so it is that from the wild winds a flurry of ash and mulch give rise to another glimmer of promise for the artists community counter culture and fringe thinkers. 


The establishment of a temporary homestead for ArtLurker and friends is a welcomed site to visit and support with canned goods and campfire stories of escapades into the tormented world of art.


Happy also are the visitors to the Collage Pottage show. The smiles are a result of the glue that bind good times with rhymes, chimes and the avant garde. The spirit is generational.


Generational are the shifts in Westwood (west of wynwood) evidenced by the action just south of the old OhWow gallery on NW 7 Ave.


Words are Weapons and you will need them.

The Spinello Gallery in its new fringe location is currently showing a collection of drawings and silkscreens inspired by banned books in history.  Great works indeed.  Manny Prieres has painstakingly traced these iconic jackets of literary genius to build a library of gauche and graphite.


Oh wow, and Manny makes the ladies sweat a bit.



Not to be out lined, this complex of gentrified kiosks in proper old Wynwood gets a nice lighting scheme to heighten the vertigo after dark.


Of fires and false alarms, the Freedom Tower has been red hot with programing.


The showcase of finalists for the Cintas Fellowship was a bit of a flub compared to the adjoining gallery where a show of Jaimie Warren's photography shocks anyone beyond the closet and out of this world .


One could juxtapose that MDC may have resources to make most 501Cs green with envy but skilled observers know such institutions can not be the establishment and the avant garde at the same time.


Of juxtapositions look no further than the Fountianhead Residencies up in Little Haiti.  A short stroll from St. Marie's Cathedral and the Little River Yacht Club is a cavernous arc of a building parceled off to accommodate all manner of creative types.  


William the aviator greets vistors with the confidence of a frequent flier.

 Funded by the legendary Mykesells of Morningside, the Fountainhead complex is a petri dish of practical application with peculiar proportion.  There is no space available in this Ayn Randian barn of bewilderment,  suffice to say it would appear that artists grow on trees.


Fifteen minute drive to the beach and a world apart from the ravages of mainland is the retail cathedral of shopping centers, Bal Harbour where another sort of art adventure is unfolding. A stroll along the open air mal is like an intoxicating breath of freshly minted monopoly money.
To walk in someone else's shoes is ok so long as they have the same size.  And the size of one's stomp matters when vying for limited art dollars.  Limited not so much as in not enough to go around but limited in that in a scripted world there are few things not rehearsed already by the haves, the have mores and everybody else.


To walk in peachy shoes and matching fur-trimmed pocho is perfectly normal at the posh Bal Harbour Mall.  To walk loudly and carry a small stick is also common among the well heeled.


To walk outside and get blinded by giant mirrored letters spelling out SANCHEZ or some such thing is actually new to the people of this tony seaside town.  It is the art of getting used to things according to one councilman.



Refreshing times call for interesting fashion directions.  That's swampy.


Andre Courreges vintage eyewear,  RedWhiteBlue Thrift find.

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