Miami

Leandro Erlich Isaac Julien New Offices for Linda Pace Foundation Art in the Bag Whitney Launching Pad Art Institute of Chicago Receives Video Art Collection MOCA Unveils Two Shows for Basel Miami Visitors Art Basel 37: Best in Show (So Far): Andrea Rosen Gallery

Send a letter to the Editor

Save to Del.icio.us Digg this

ArtInfo’s Miami correspondent takes us on a tour of some of the city’s most interesting gallery and museum shows, including a trompe l’oeil prankster showing at Emmanuel Perrotin; an artist who blends the natural and consumer worlds at Bernice Steinbaum; and an impressive 40-year retrospective of video art at Miami Art Central.
--------------------------

GALLERY EXHIBITIONS

Emmanuel Perrotin
“Leandro Ehrlich”
Through Nov. 25

Leandro Erlich is the merry prankster of the global art circuit. The Argentina-born illusionist—who splits his time between Buenos Aires and Paris—specializes in staging highly interactive, human-scaled installations.

His The Swimming Pool at the 2001 Venice Biennale invited visitors to walk under the water, letting them experience the sensations of this perspective without getting wet; The Doors at the 2004 Sao Paulo Biennial was a hallway with doors that emitted light—but led only to more darkness.

Erlich’s first solo show in Miami includes photographs from a performance earlier this year in Japan in which artists, curators and locals crawled atop a horizontal building façade reflected in a mirror propped at a 45-degree angle—so that the participants appear to be hanging improbably and precariously from window frames.

But the showstopper of this exhibition is The Corridor, visible from the entrance of this Wynwood District gallery. The vacant hallway appears to extend through the rear of the gallery, and to angle left and right when one walks around the room, as if the work is reacting to each visitor’s own movements. Only upon closer inspection does it become clear that The Corridor is actually protruding from the back wall, not piercing through it.

Also on view is The Ring (as in boxing ring), which also seems to open up the gallery space, but turns out to be merely a triangular platform made square by its reflection in a mounted mirror. (At the opening in September, Erlich playfully sparred within the ring with a friend.)

These elaborate trompe l’oeil constructions are only fleetingly deceptive. Erlich inevitably tips his hand, revealing his tricks to turn our double takes into second thoughts as we reconsider how and what we perceive. His works provoke us to experience ordinary spaces anew, letting us step outside our reality when we enter his senses-altering house of mirrors.
--------------------------

Bernice Steinbaum
Brian Burkhardt
Through Nov. 4

In Brian Burkhardt’s first solo show in Miami, the Boston-based artist, whose work often looks to blur the lines between the natural world and cultural artifice, has created a laboratory of man-made organisms, built from such unexpected materials as painted glue, wire, silk and fur shavings, all meticulously applied on polymer clay or fabric mounted on Plexiglass.

Opalescent, hybrid dragonflies (Militant helio-adaptus) flock behind the front desk, and “The Luxury Collection” of butterflies crisscross around corners, their silk wings stamped in the logo patterns of Gucci and Louis Vuitton (more elegant than a Murakami handbag).

Also on view: U.S. DOT Butterfly, an installation in which a rough outline of the United States is tacked with butterflies whose wings are digitally abstracted from each state license plate into exotic, pixillated patterns that mimic batik and tie-dye prints.

The work Seven Specimen Surveillance Beetle Painting is an encased rainbow of hand-painted beetles individually sculpted from polymer clay.

A row of bell jars display mutated jellyfish consuming all sorts of consumer detritus: plastic grocery bags, lightbulbs, even a Sprint cellphone rigged to ring with the gallery phone. And Starfish sprouting painted-glue googly-eyes cling to a shiny phones in Pisaster Techno-parasitic adaptus B. Burkhardt (common green pearl star).

In Burkhardt’s vision, it’s not only humans, but lesser species, that have adapted to our heavily wired, brand-obsessed world.

Burkhardt sums up this vision on the invitation card to the show, which features a photograph of him dressed like a longshoreman in a skiff that is carrying netted TVs crawling with starfish.