2008 PROGRAMS AND INSTALLATIONS

This year PULSE Miami is proud to host an array of exciting and ambitious programs and installations including a curated video program, large scale and site specific installations and the second edition of GEISAI Miami.

GEISAI Miami

PULSE Miami 2008 will once again host GEISAI Miami, now in its second edition held outside of Japan. Produced by Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd., Takashi Murakami's studio, GEISAI Miami will provide a juried group of young artists the opportunity to directly present their work to the public in a professional art fair setting. GEISAI Miami 2008 will expand in size, and is to feature new elements.

PULSE PLAY >
Exiles, Curated by Magda Gonzalez-Mora

Independent curator and art critic Magda Gonzalez-Mora, who divides her time between Cuba, Canada, and Madagascar, will curate Exiles for PULSE PLAY >. A founding member of the Havana Biennale curatorial team in 1984, and participating until 2000, Gonzalez-Mora has also been involved in the inaugural Dakar Biennale in 1992, and the Johannesburg Biennale in 1995.

Exiles is a curatorial project of videos and animations from international artists working dealing with issues of estrangement and projects a broader perspective on emigration and displacement. Beyond the context of physical movement across borders, it explores issues around isolation and survival within immediate alien surroundings.

Among the artists exhibiting in PULSE PLAY > are:

Eva Davidova/ Location One and Two and other short animations, 2003-2005
Farheen Haq/ Endless Tether, 2005 & Remember, 2008
Rodolfo Peraza/ For your Safety
Isabel Rocamora/ Horizon of Exile, 2007
Lazaro Saavedra/ Eternity & Untitled, 1997
Mariana Vassileva/ Definition, 2006
Nezaket Ekici/ Hullabelly for Turkish Women, 2005 & Living Spot, 2005
Glenda Leon/ Destiny, 2003

THE PULSE PRIZE
Sponsored by the Financial Times

The PULSE Prize is a $2,500 cash prize awarded to an emerging artist exhibiting in the IMPULSE section. The recipient is selected by a guest curator and the PULSE Selection Committee. Previous PULSE Prize recipients include: Chen Chieh-Jen, Philip Gurrey, Chris Natrop, Duke Riley, and Travis Somerville. The 6th recipient of the PULSE Prize will be announced on Thursday, December 4 at 1pm.

Financial Times and CORE: club Present CORE: conversations

PULSE Miami is pleased to present for the first time a special series of events and panel discussions on the contemporary art market hosted by the Financial Times and the CORE: club, which will be open to VIP card holders.

Among the topics are “The Contemporary Art Market Boom & Its Expansion Eastward,” a panel discussion on the rise of contemporary Asian art along with “Emerging Art Markets – Keeping Pace,” and a regular series of breakfast talks with contemporary artists and collectors. Participants will include contemporary artists, collectors, curators, and other distinguished art world leaders.

Lincoln Schatz
Esquire's Portrait of the 21st Century
Represented by bitforms gallery

Esquire's Portrait of the 21st Century is a massive video installation commissioned by the Hearst Corporation in celebration of Esquire magazine's 75th anniversary.

The installation includes generative portraits of Marc Jacobs, Samantha Power, Santiago Calatrava, LeBron James, George Clooney, David Chang, Jeff Bezos, Danger Mouse, Elon Musk, Ken Griffin, Noah Feldman, M.I.A., Jay Keasling, and others.

Schatz created the portraits using his Cube, a ten-foot-by-ten-foot sculptural portrait environment fitted with 24 cameras that was shown at PULSE Miami 2007. Capturing each subject in thousands of video files, Schatz's Cube portraits perpetually evolve to reconfigure perception and reorder time.

Leo Villareal
Horizon
Represented by Conner Contemporary Art

Villareal’s sculptures are energetic, colorful and engaging. Horizon, comprised of nine opaque Plexiglas tubes, light emitting diodes, a Mac mini and power supply, generates imagery inspired by the terrain of the Miami area, with its dramatic convergence of land, sea and air.

Jade Townsend and William Powhida
Lemonade Stand
Represented by Shroeder Romero

Jade Townsend and William Powhida’s Lemonade Crate will serve as an illegal bar at the art fair, where artists, dealers, and the public will be able to stop and share a drink and perhaps some gossip. The artists will also include an expanded lineup of activities and merchandise such as art cups, original t-shirts, custom art fair guides, art buying advice, and counseling for bitter artists and depressed dealers.

Paul Villinski
Air Chair
Represented by Morgan Lehman

From the artist:
This piece explores metaphors of flight and the poetic implications of humankind's age-old desire to enter that foreign element -- the sky. The idea for Air Chair came to me while running. The route from my studio in Long Island City, NY usually takes me past two VA Hospitals located on Roosevelt Island. These are home to many disabled, wheelchair-bound men who often pass the time at the riverside, along my course. The irony of running for pleasure past dozens of men no longer able to walk is never lost on me. Seeing these men year after year started me thinking about wheelchairs, and I began to ponder what I would want, were I confined to a chair by disability or old age. I knew at once it would need to be capable of getting airborne. If I were to lose use of my legs, I would want to trade them for wings.

Air Chair is my gift to the Vets at Roosevelt Island, and to all of us who believe that life’s challenges can be met with hope, imagination, determination, and grace.

Conrad Bakker
Banner (sale)
Represented by Lora Reynolds Gallery

Known for his intentionally imprecise hand-painted wood replicas of mass-produced objects, Bakker's banner addresses the power and strangeness of the commodity object/image while exploring relationships of production versus consumption, the handmade versus the mass-produced and the value of utility versus the value of exchange.

Norbert Brunner
TIMEBUBBLE
Represented by Lukas Feichtner Gallery

TIMEBUBBLE is a visual communication platform and a cosmos of its own. All visual information projected onto it can only be recognized from a certain pre-determined viewpoint and dissolves spatially into thousands of dots when this viewpoint is changed. This installation focuses on the beholders who themselves become the artists as they choose their viewpoint and have to re-interpret the abstract images they create.

Justin Cooper
Thread
Represented by moniquemeloche

Thread employs miles of actual garden hoses, a common material in Cooper's multi-media practice, to make a site-specific work that vacillates between sculpture and drawing. Cooper's hoses twist and unfurl throughout the space, and at times, arch midair as if in a state of free suspension. Viewers are free to navigate the work and experience various opposing pairs: order vs. chaos, stability vs. instability, form vs. formlessness -- dichotomies also characteristic of the artist's small sculptures, drawings, videos and performance. (Excerpted in part from Review by Susan Snodgrass in Art in America September 2008.)

Glue Society
Relics

Relics is a collection of amber fossils 80 million years from now.

Michael A. Salter
Giant Styrobot
Represented by think.21 gallery

The exploration of consumerism and its consequent litter, combined with a fascination for character designs, led American artist Michael A. Salter to create robots of various shapes and sizes. Called Styrobots, these sculptures are made of polystyrene packing pieces found in computer, toys or electrical appliances boxes that are puzzled together. With Giant Styrobot, whose monolithic scale, singular color and media humorously conveys Minimalism, Salter creates a playful and unsettling experience while commenting on waste, the re-use of discarded material, the failure of technology and our uneasy relationship with it.

Sandra Bermudez
American Pastoral
Represented by SPINELLO GALLERY

The wallpaper installation American Pastoral is based on Toile de Jouy: a decorating pattern usually depicting a pastoral theme. Bermudez' imagery, however, replaces the french landscape for contemporary clothing advertisements for teenagers. The photography-based ads present all-American young overtly sexualized figures running amok in a forest.

Jude Tallichet
Career Retrospective as Charms for a Charm Bracelet
Represented by Sara Meltzer Gallery

PULSE will host the first "stop" of Jude Tallichet: Career Retrospective as Charms for a Charm Bracelet, presented by Sara Meltzer Gallery. The artist has re-made miniature sculptures from her repertoire in silver, gold and platinum, for sale as limited edition charms. The showroom of this retrospective will be in a highly polished DWR Airstream trailer that will be parked in front of our private press and preview party, and will be situated in other locations throughout the week.

Mike Estabrook & Ernest Conception
Kangarok IV
Represented by P.P.O.W Gallery

Though appropriately rooted in a history of serious art by serious artists depicting serious scenes of violence and death, The Shining Mantis' own war game challenges that same art historical tradition to a duel with a playfulness, ephemerality, and collaborative bent. Drawn in chalk, an artistic tool as powerful as any other, though admittedly more vulnerable to time, the in-battle artistic strikes neither aim for nor result in a simple destruction, but instead for and in a compounded meaning and added layers of beautiful absurdity.

Erik Moskowitz and Amanda Trager
Cloud Cuckoo Land
Presented by Momenta Art

The video presented by Momenta Art for Pulse Miami 2008 is named after a line in the Aristophanes' play The Birds, which first put the possibility of progress (and the goal of Utopia) into doubt. The narrative encompasses a family's move to a contemporary, progressive commune in which the central character is confronted by her own intolerance and inability to let go of the conventions of individualized life. The familiar boundaries to which she clings call into question how we envision comfort and safety both societally and psychologically.

Momenta Art is a non-profit exhibition space that has been located in Williamsburg Brooklyn since 1995. Momenta is dedicated to showing work by emerging and underrepresented artists whose work either critiques commercial structures or has otherwise earned special recognition. Momenta has given first solo shows to artists such as Huma Bhabha, Omer Fast, Kristen Lucas, Wangechi Mutu, and Banks Violette.

Momenta has had a long commitment to video art, and part of this commitment has been to inaugurate a permanent library of work by over 60 Momenta alumni. We encourage you to visit Momenta and to view any of these works, including this piece being screened at Pulse Miami, in the gallery's dedicated screening room.

Luis Alonzo
Love in a Time of Uncertainty
Represented by Locust Projects