MIAMI— “Hip-hop baroque” is one phrase that's aptly been used to describe the work of Luis Gispert. In one of his photographs, a gangster appears to levitate; in his sound works, beefy speakers and ghetto blasters predominate; in a sculpture, he riffs on oblique signifiers of urban culture such as the Nike logo and the design of the Newport cigarette box.

Born in New Jersey and raised in Miami, the Cuban-American artist hit the international art world running in 2002, when his slick, electric-hued photographs of blinged-out cheerleaders appeared in the Whitney Biennial. A few years later he returned to the Whitney to show the film Stereomongrel (co-directed with Jeffrey Reed), which paid a kind of hip-hop-inspired homage to the museum, with a young girl and two glamorously made-up Asian women in elaborate costumes cavorting among Koons vacuum cleaners, Rosenquist paintings, and other modern American masterpieces in the Whitney’s permanent collection. Last year he showed his latest film, Smother, at New York’s Mary Boone gallery (with related photos and sculptures on view across the street at his main gallery, Zach Feuer.) Following a script co-written with artist Orly Genger, the 26-minute film is a brief excursion into the nightmarish domestic life of an eight-year-old Miami boy, a chronic bedwetter, who, in his bedroom, fashions out of cardboard a kind of magic boombox that he totes around on his bicycle, making stops at various semi-surrealistic locales, such as a graveyard for plastic pink flamingo lawn ornaments and a slaughterhouse. Filmed in Los Angeles, it is nevertheless redolent with the imagery of ’80s Miami — like the kid’s checkered Vans, the inclusion of a supporting actor from the iconic ’80s Miami flick Scarface, and even the title, EL MUNDO ES TUYO (THE WORLD IS YOURS), which were the words emblazoned on a sculpture owned by Scarface’s drug-lord protagonist, Tony Montana — that Gispert knows intimately from his own childhood there. In the film’s excruciating climax, a man deposits a German shepherd into a deep-fryer, then extracts a ghetto blaster from the animal's gnarled, crispy carcass. Only Gispert could make the grotesque so utterly glam.

This week marks a homecoming of sorts for Gispert, with “Heavy Manner,” a show at Miami’s Fredric Snitzer Gallery, which runs from December 5 to January 3. Snitzer is giving Smother its Miami debut, showing alongside it a suite of related photographs and sculptures.

Below are a few of Gispert’s don’t-miss shows during the Art Basel Miami Beach madness.

1. The Station, curated by Shamim Momin and Nate Lowman, at Midblock East, through December 7 

“Shamim Momin schools Miami with her visionary eye, mashing art-world usual suspects like Terence Koh and Sterling Ruby with young, up-and-coming talents like Diana Al-Hadid and Justin Beal.”  

2. GisMo: Limplezas (cleansings) at Carol Jazzar Contemporary Art, through January 10, 2009  

“The Miami-based performance-photographic duo GisMo drops the final installment of their "Everglades" series. In a time of digitally overmanipulated images, the GisMo girls refreshingly create magically ethereal photographs using archaic, analog camera techniques.”

3. Florencio Gelabert: Intersections at the Frost Art Museum, through February 28, 2009

“Florencio Gelabert, a member the first generation of Cuban contemporary artists to emigrate to the U.S. in the ’80s, is a key figure who greatly influenced the subsequent generations who make up the Miami art scene now. ‘Intersections’ is a multimedia exhibition in which Gelabert continues to explore the themes that he has been excavating for the last decade.”

Sarah Douglas is Staff Writer at Art+Auction. She blogs at "The Appraisal."