exhibitions

intersections

Opening June 23th 5 – 8 pm

June 23 – August 4, 2023

intersections, a group presentation at New World reflects on common ideas of being, as well as concepts such as existence, becoming, and reality. Like Theodor Adorno and Mark Horkheimer, intersections  inquires upon the function of the public sphere as a receptacle of meaning, philosophical contemplation, and genuinely observes individual structures through which independence is achieved.

New World School of the Arts gathers Maria Theresa Barbist, Kelly Breez, Carolina Cueva, Premonition Bureau, Hunter Osking, and Juan Sebastian Restrepo to present their work as a way to demonstrate a commitment to the importance of sustaining artists who reside in our communities. In this group show, curated by Juan Sebastian Restrepo, Technical Assistant of the Visual Arts Department, and co-curated by Kate Ortega, Library Assistant in the Visual Arts Department, intersections  attempts to mediate relationships that go beyond literal signals and beholds the public sphere as an ecology rife with meaning making, independently mediated by autonomous beings.

If we look up the definition of intersections, we see that it is defined as “a point or line common to lines or surfaces that intersect.” Finding relationships with peers, colleagues, friends, and loved ones in a gathering place and building relationships with one another will provide insight onto the burgeoning Miami local art scene, a viewpoint on Miami culture, and an opportunity to honor in shared space some of the individuals that make up a dynamic field of working artists.

While setting up this exhibition I already had in mind the artist participating. Each one provides a significant point of view that brings us closer to understanding the circumstances that we live in today. The gallery space is treated here as a vessel in which questions are invitationally co-created; it is an intersecting point where people socialize and designate new folds in our perception.

Juan Sebastian Restrepo

Further Visions by Kate Ortega

Each artist moves along idiosyncratic circuitries, revisioning their art practices in accord with kinetic and scapes. Sinuous and specific, these makers variably consider the ways in which our footsteps, whether through an interior or in-between exchange, are not discretely compartmentalized or insulated from each other’s passage; whether within the synchronicity of a nested instant, or along multigenerational acts of return and reckoning, individuality is charged with interdependence. Inevitably, the trails our bodies draw and the residues they trickle behind will intersect, whether or not graced by another’s  notice. While their elusive and saturate behavior may transcend our capacity to trace their course, these collisions continue to bear ruptures and syntheses throughout our moment-upon-moment weave.

The present exhibition honors the translucent map-making and terrain-crossing that Miami’s art communities labor towards and delight in. Not only are these artists resisting the impulse to fissure and stray from one another by contributing to an interdisciplinary, shared project, but also their imagery and the research processes by which their art objects emerge are rooted in ontologies of encounter, liminality, and narrative. In this collaborative space, displacement operates through memory and affect, history and ancestry, as well as through neighborhood walks on which to forage image and object. Upon switching to unfamiliar ground, where we may nestle and observe temporarily –  by gliding between meeting points –  our collective and personal fullness intimates and intricates in a rhizomatic dance. In this way, relation allows for transformation; we participate in meanings which become symphonic, resonant, and brimming with particularity.

[Artist Bios below]

Maria Theresa Barbist was born in Schwaz, Austria and lives and works in Miami, Florida. She translates traumatic memories and emotional states into performative actions, moving pictures and sculptural objects. Barbist holds a PhD in psychology from the University of Innsbruck and received her MFA in New Genres from the San Francisco Art Institute.

Selected Solo exhibitions include KINDERLAND (2019), Taplin Gallery, Miami, Florida, FADENSPIELE (2015) Swenson Gallery, Miami, Florida and LEBENSBILDER – Life in Pictures (2013), Studio 16 Gallery, San Francisco, California. Selected group exhibitions include at the Diego Rivera Gallery, ‘Echoes: From There To Here’ (2019), at the Neue Galerie Home Is Where The Heart Is (2018) and at the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami Intersectionality in South Florida (2016).

Barbist received an Ellies from Oolite Arts (2020), a Community Grant from the Miami Dade Department for Cultural Affairs (2019), and an Awesome Foundation grant (2018) as well as residencies at the Bakehouse Art Complex and the Culver Overtown library through ProjectArt. Her work is in the Miami Airport Collection and several private collections. As part of the BABA Collective she is collecting oral histories of South Florida based artists in the Rocking Chair Sessions podcast. During the pandemic she has recorded her debut EP of orig inal songs under the moniker MY AUXILIARY EGO which was released in June 2021.

Kelly Breeze

Artist Statement

 If Barbara Kruger and Pee-Wee Hermann had had a kid –  and honestly I wish they had –  that kid would be me. My work chronicles life’s absurdities–particularly in its seedier elements. It’s about finding balance between the humor necessary to navigate a harsh world and the irreverence necessary to survive it. I work in painting, illustration, sculpture and installation, with an emphasis on mundane materials. The high gloss Bar Top resin that covers many of my pieces, for instance, is a direct nod to my greatest muse and inspiration: the smoky old treasure-filled dive bar, crowded with human and non-human relics. More recently, I’m creating a painterly effect  in my MATCHBOOK series (a companion to my ongoing HOW-TO BOOK series) by working with a semi-gloss sealer, exposing the brush strokes.

The result is renderings of matchbook covers that feel stolen from some alternate universe, both alien and familiar. I’m forever engaged in observing and telling stories that too often go unnoticed.

Formal Bio

Kelly Breez , b. 1985 in Lake Worth, Florida and lives and works in Miami, Florida. Breez received a BFA from New World School of the Arts, 2008. She works in -and combines- illustration, sculpture, and painting. Selected solo exhibitions include: ‘The Matchbook Series’ (2023) Dalé Zine booth, NADA Art Fair NY, NY. ‘Any M ajor Dude Will Tell You’ (2020) Primary Projects, Miami, Florida. ‘An Important Library Full of Important Knowledge’ (2018) Soho Beach House, Miami Beach, Florida. Selected group exhibitions include: ‘Phraseology’ (2022) The Bass Museum, Miami Beach, Florida. ‘Sunshowers’ (2021) Dale Zine, Miami, Florida. ‘Never Say Die!’ (2018) Subliminal Projects, Los Angeles, California. ‘Ediacaran Mind’ (2017) Faena Forum, Miami Beach, Florida.

Breez was an Artist-in-Residence at Anderson Ranch, Snowmass Colorado (2020) and was commissioned for a permanent public installation by the Facebook Artist-in-Residence program (2018) Miami, Florida. Breez received a commission from Art In Public Places (2021) through Virgin Voyages, Miami, Florida, and won the ProMax BDA Gold Medal for Outstanding Creative Direction and Design: Sundance TV ‘Week-Day’ Interstitial (2013).

Carolina Cueva  was born in Lima, Peru and raised in Miami Beach, Florida. An artist and educator, Cueva works in sculpture, performance and 2D works.

Cueva follows an intuitive form of making, layering investigation and invocation that deepens her connection to source. Cueva draws from her Quechua Indigeneity, Andean heritage and her cross-cultural upbringing, often pointing to the artist’s experience of par ts of herself displaced by colonialism in Peru and immigration to the United States.

Selected group exhibitions include Photo L.A, Los Angeles, CA (2017), Port Angeles Fine Arts Center, Port Angeles, WA (2019), Dimensions Variable, Miami, FL (2020), Oolite Arts, Miami Beach, FL(2022). Selected performances include NADA Miami, Miami, FL (2018), Doral Contemporary Art Museum, Doral, FL(2019), and Piero Atchugarry Gallery, Miami, FL(2020). One person exhibitions include The Art and Culture Center, Hollywood, FL (2022). Cueva was awarded a Wavemaker Grant and an Artist Access Grant in 2021. She is currently an artist in residence at Oolite Arts.

In addition to her art practice she works with youth and is invested in the transformative, restorative, and change – making capacities of imagination and expression. She has an extensive history working with museums, institutions and non-profits as an educator and teaching artist throughout Miami-Dade County.

Premonition Bureau (est. 2020) Biography

Artist: Chris Dougnac

 The Premonition Bureau is a shapeshifting corporation founded in 2020 by artist Chris Dougnac, who claims they are a fellow of the organization.

Lifting the name from the British Premonitions Bureau, established in 1966 to investigate all prophetic visions reported by the public through a dial-in hotline, The Premonition Bureau declares itself as an art security company that protects altered histories and expansive world building practices.

Through performance and multimedia works that employ blue color labor and everyday means of production, the Premonition Bureau exacts a poetic institutional critique that highlights the feedback loop of modern theoretical dialogues within the contemporary art space.

The Premonition Bureau functions as a vehicle for Dougnac to blur the boundaries of the work of art by repositioning its origin through time and space, between the public and the private.

Hunter Osking is an artist, photographer, and filmmaker from Pine Island, Florida. He has directed several music videos and short films. In 2022 he presented Boy Heaven , a multi channel video installation, at CENTRAL FINE in Miami Beach.

Georgia  tells the story of Hunter, an innocent in his mid twenties who is attempting to manage his first ever friendship while dealing with a deranged stalker who has been assaulting and attacking him for nearly his entire life. Hunter’s childish perspective is u sed to explore themes of alienation, violence, and sexuality. Shot entirely on an old camcorder, using mostly natural light and public spaces, Georgia  attempts to mimic the aesthetic of a school project or home movie.

The film was shot almost entirely by Sienna Takabe and Hunter Osking over the course of a weekend, but Alina van Ryzin, Betty McGhee and Tyler Stewart gave some additional help with camera work. In addition to her camera work and acting, Sienna Takabe also designed the clothes for the film.

Juan Sebastian Restrepo  lives and works in Miami, Florida from his studio in the Birds Roads Arts District. He was born in Colombia, Barranquilla but migrated to the United States at an early age. They rekindle memories of their life through humor, craft and labor. He is deeply influenced by Dutch and retablo paintings. But his goal is to represent and present contemporary perspectives of his hybrid identity.

He takes from his experience of being raised in a single parent household, with his mother, the struggle to overcome everyday challenges within a patriarchal society, ruled by aggression and anti-sentimental values. Being raised in a diverse part of the United States allowed him to come to terms with his differences and strengths.

Sebastian has presented his work at Edwardsville Arts Center, Edwardsville, IL , Hybridity (2018); Belen Jesuit Preparatory School, Carlos and Olga Saladrigas Gallery at the Ignatian Center for the Arts, Miami, FL, Outside the Lines (2023); Club Gallery Miami, Miami, FL, Art Deli: Blue Chips (2023). Sebastian received a Research Grant for Graduate Students from Southern Illinois University Edwardsville , IL (2020).

Kate Hannah Ortega

Through a will to listen and linger, my practice attends to that which is elusive – moment, light, whisper, wind – and to under images that seep through translucently, revealing themselves when a recipient doubts that the envelope need be an encounter’s end. Invisibility does not confirm absence and quietude does not promise stasis. Letter-writing, shadow-dancing, bookbinding, tracing twig to soil, dissecting seedpods, and drawing by hand are disciplines which allow me to witness moments that would sprawl and speckle even without me near. I feel guided to forage and tinker with minutiae, to have an earnest conversation with those images and beings who are ordinarily named illegible or unmoving. An object which tends not to show outward signs of vitality may house on its interior the beginnings of lively development – misread as asleep until it emerges on our own side of the sheath. I care and tend towards reception of subtle transmissions; reveling in the soft touch that hums electrically, in unfurling potentiation, I believe in the song that resounds from the slight and shy. I long to hear their tender yell, to kneel down and lean my ear.

Born in 1999, Kate Hannah Ortega has lived in Miami, FL for just a sliver more than half her life. She graduated from the New World School of the Arts High School Visual Arts Program in 2018 and is currently studying Psychology and English Literature at the undergraduate level. At present she works in a small yet kinetic Visual Arts Library, though in the past she has volunteered in a poetry festival, an early learning center, on a literary magazine design team, in a guided reading and arts program for children living in temporary shelters, as well as through assistantships at an artist residency and in mental health research labs. Neighborhood walks spur her each day to keep eyes down and hands open to gather pebbles, fallen buds, and seedpods; this practice invites dear impulses to behold, return, winnow, and steward.

misael soto’ s practice interrogates and subverts contextually associated everyday objects and systemic roles, disrupting and manipulating space, systems, and frameworks. The publicly accessible, time-based, and ephemeral work involves interventions made upon existing objects, performative activations, institutional mediations, and is often a combination of these elements. Pointing to truths found within the equivocal and disturbing presumed permanence are foundational goals. The novelty and uncanny nature of these situations, and the vulnerability asked from viewers, aligns their attention with the present and reveals circumstantial actualities leading to dialogue around critical contemporary concerns.

Born in Puerto Rico (1986) and based in Miami, misael received their MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2018) and graduated Magna Cum Laude with a Bachelor’s Degree in Art History from Florida Atlantic University (2008). misael was the first ever Art in Public Life Resident with the City of Miami Beach’s Department of Environment and Sustainability and Oolite Arts, where they founded the Department of Reflection . Beyond their public artworks which they have shown extensively for many years, misael has exhibited at MCA Chicago, Open Engagement 2015, the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami, Material Art Fair in Mexico City, David Castillo Gallery in Miami, and Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale, amongst others. misael is a studio artist and the Director of Time-based Programming at Dimensions Variable and has participated in the Heat Exchange, Exchange program with BFI Miami and Rogaland Kunstsenter in Stavanger, Norway; Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts’ Fall 2020 Residency Program in Omaha, NE; The Fountainhead Residency in Miami, FL; the ACRE Residency Program in Steuben, WI; and HomeBase Project’s HB Build Artist-in-Residence program in Berlin.