Posted on Sun, Dec. 04, 2011

Beyond the international cachet of Art Basel Miami Beach, there are lasting influences on South Florida. Among them are the new crop of artists that pops up every several years, who have chosen to live and exhibit here, because they can.

This year was no exception: Another group of relatively new faces left impressive imprints around town, artists who work in a wide variety of genres, and credit a variety of sources as to why and how they are in Miami. Here are just a few.

CHRISTINA PETTERSSON

Christina Pettersson has made distinctive marks with her graphite-on-paper drawings. At a solo show at the Spinello Gallery, her piece called please don’t bury me in wood was a haunting — no, downright terrifying — drawing of a woman trapped alive in an underground casing. Her figures are often self-portraits, of women falling, verging on the edge of something unknown, maybe on the cusp of dying. Recently, her work could be seen in various spaces, including at MAM’s “New Work Miami” show; in the

exhibition of the winners of the prestigious South Florida Cultural Consortium at the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood; and currently in the group show from Primary Projects.

The Swedish-born Pettersson is a high-school graduate of New World School of the Arts, and then of the Maryland Institute of the Arts. She says she didn’t plan to return to Miami after high school, but when she decided to make art full-time again, she realized “so many of the artists I went to school with had moved back. And of course Basel had made a name for Miami, and changed everything. There actually was art here. It’s been a good place to start.”

But the draw was also that is wasn’t a completely settled

artistic land. “It is a city founded on fantasy, borrowing from whatever culture suits best at the moment,” she says. “Bright shiny colors may be the hackneyed cliché here, but the real aesthetic is that Miami recloaks itself anew on a daily basis, and so do I.”

ZACK BALBER

Zack Balber is a young photographer, also a graduate of the New World School of the Arts, who just had his first solo outing at the Snitzer Gallery this fall, the portrait series “Tamim.”

Balber snapped some very rough looking Jewish men, shirts off, covered with tattoos. “I love to take pictures of things I am not supposed

to,” explains Balber. “Being an image-based artist in Miami is exciting. The scenarios and subjects I take pictures of are usually dangerous and risky in a place made out of candy — lots of strange people, and a real melting pot of different cultures.”

A made-in-Miami influence occurred when he was waiting tables at Soyka during school, he remembers. He met famed photographer Bruce Weber and was “swept away by the allure of one of the best fashion photographers in the world. I learned a great deal from him. Bruce encouraged me to go follow my dream to be an artist.”

Balber credits the faculty of New World, including active artists such as Maria Martinez Canas and Karen

Rifas, with making Miami a place where he could start a career.

JILLIAN MAYER

Jillian Mayer is a Miami born-and-bred video and performance artist who seems to be showing everywhere these days. She had a recent solo show at the David Castillo Gallery and was featured in MOCA’s “Optic Nerve Film Festival.” She could be seen in exhibits as a South Florida Cultural Consortium winner and was a Cintas Foundation finalist (a generous grant for artists of Cuban heritage).

Mayer currently has a show at World Class Boxing, the space run by prominent collectors Debra and Dennis Scholl. She will be part of the Legal Art residency for

2012.

As could be seen at the Castillo gallery and “Optic Nerve,” Mayer is not shy in her usage of saturated color and unsettling images; she pushed the edges of both sides of the female lifespan with some trippy videos of the birth of herself, and of everybody’s grandmother (not).

While the Florida International University graduate quips that the biggest influence of Miami on her is that “it made my career and my art more sexy,” she points to FIU associate painting professor and artist Pip Brant as someone who helped mold her trajectory, along with Miami-based artists Naomi Fisher, Jim Drain and fellow gallery mates.

Fabian Peña

Fabian Peña took a much different path on his way to his solo show this fall, also at the David Castillo Gallery (he’s a Cintas finalist and was in MAM’s “New Work” show as well). After studying at the Superior Institute of Arts in Havana and showing in Cuba, Peña left in 2004 and exhibited in Mexico and Europe before landing in the United States with a show at Bernice Steinbaum’s gallery.

Peña’s distinct style, and in particular material, includes covering collages of pop imagery from both the United States and Cuba with crushed remnants of cockroach wings and houseflies. He buys the insects by the bulk to create his pieces. There’s a startling and powerful beauty in the contrast of these works.

“I moved to Miami in June 2006 and found an interesting place to explore,” he says. “It was the place where Art Basel happens, and Miami was the spot where galleries from other places were focused on. Wynwood and the artist’s community captured my attention.” Of course, he acknowledges, the close connection to Cuba is also a draw, “with friends from all stages of my live, the climate, [there is] a vague feeling of being at home.”

For a few years he showed only in New York and Mexico, until Castillo saw his work. What resulted was the

show “Subliminal.” The gallery and Miami are a good fit, he concludes: “I love diversity, and I think diversity is the perfect environment in which to grow as an artist.”

ANTONIA WRIGHT

Antonia Wright is a physical performance artist, steeped in the Miami cultural scene — her mother is the crime novelist Carolina Garcia-Aguilera. She also has an MFA in poetry from the New School.

Her work could have been encountered numerous times this year: She had a two-video installation at the Spinello Gallery, and she has a studio at the ArtCenter/South Florida. She was in “Optic Nerve” and organized the performances for the inaugural Wynwood Art Fair. Last month, she showed off photography at the quirky dental office of the art collector Arturo Mosquera,

in a show called Where All of Your Quinceanera Dreams Come True.

Although Wright previously could be seen rolling down a filthy alley in South Beach for one of her videos, for Quinceanera she paid visits to numerous shops that cater to the Latin tradition of a girl’s coming out party; she put on the Baroque dresses and stood in front of backdrops of fantasy lands and delved into the Quince obsession.

Subject matters have helped keep Wright here: “Miami has a lot of really bizarre things going on that you don’t see in most cities, which you can explore in a number of ways,” she says.

But her major influence has always been her mother: “I love the Miami-based crime genre she is a part of — you realize how many subplots there are beneath the

surface of this city. …You can’t make up most of the things that go on here.”

John Sanchez

John Sanchez uses his paintbrush to depict twilight

scenarios, just after the rain, of parking lots and airport runways, where the hourly wage earner has just gone home or is just arriving.

The New Jersey native expresses an “everyman” vision

in paintings that have been shown at, for instance, the Vanishing Points exhibit at the Bass Museum this fall, and mostly, at the Dorsch Gallery.

His latest show in the main space there was called As TheyAre, and again proved his talent with oil on canvas.

In fact the Dorsch Gallery turns out to be a cornerstone to Sanchez’s tie to the Miami art world. Without an established gallery — a thing that 20 years ago hardly existed — to shepherd some of his work, we may never have seen it.

“I started as an intern with the Dorsch gallery,” recalls Sanchez. “I have always had the philosophy that you must be around good people to have good things happen. … I got to participate in group shows during my internship and later my first solo show, which was a hit, and the rest is not quite history, but history in the making.”

OTHER ARTISTS

A handful of other local work has made a splash of late: Loriel Beltran’s superb lumber sculptures at Snitzer; Christy Gast’s videos at Gallery Diet; and Nicolas Lobo’s cough-syrup inspired works at Charest-Weinberg Gallery come to mind.