DANIEL ARSHAM

Arsham hopes newsprint piece brings Basel to you

Miami artist Daniel Arsham followed up his much-publicized collaboration with Merce Cunningham by exploring printed material as art medium.

BY DANIEL CHANG

dchang@MiamiHerald.com

CHARLES TRAINOR JR. / MIAMI HERALD STAFF

Daniel Arsham, in his Hialeah studio, leans against an iceberg scultpure slated for exhibit at Viscaya Museum.

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• Bid on Blueprint for a city in Ruin (Fence), an original work by Daniel Arsham, to benefit the Herald's Wish Book Charities

A lot has happened in the career of Miami artist Daniel Arsham since he was selected to collaborate with legendary American choreographer Merce Cunningham in February.

Arsham created a centerpiece sculpture for the stage and designed the set and costumes for the dancers who performed a piece titled eyeSpace at the Carnival Center for the Performing Arts.

The collaboration brought Arsham considerable attention from the art world, and since then, the 1999 graduate of Miami's Design and Architecture High School has moved into a new studio and begun exploring printed material as an art medium.

Arsham approached The Miami Herald in the summer with the idea of running original artwork during Art Basel Miami Beach. Today, his work Paper Erosion appears in the Miami Herald as the third of five original works by South Florida artists running through Sunday.

''People may read about [Art Basel],'' he says of his proposal to the Herald, ``but they aren't necessarily going to go. This is a chance to bring the art to them.''

Arsham says he started thinking about printed material as an art medium about a year ago, when he found himself wishing he had more than just a postcard as a memento of his past art exhibitions.

His solution: make a poster for each show. Arsham created his first poster in June for North Miami's Museum of Contemporary Art exhibition of Merce Cunningham: Dancing on the Cutting Edge, Part 2, a show of the sculpture, costumes and set Arsham created in collaboration with Cunningham for the Merce in Miami festival. Arsham made a second poster to commemorate an exhibition of his work in Australia in October.

But it wasn't until Arsham saw an exhibit of works by the artist Gordon Matta-Clark at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art that Arsham started thinking about newsprint as an art medium.

Arsham's work for today's Art on Newsprint series was aimed at evoking an uncanny sense of the familiar mingling with the unexpected.

''I wanted to make the paper appear that it was made of a different material or appear to be doing something it wasn't supposed to be doing,'' he says.

The erosions in the image give it depth, he says, and likens the black space in the center to the black circles that cartoon characters slap onto walls to make a hasty exit.

The background for Arsham's Art on Newsprint work is the Herald's real estate classifieds, because they're advertising architecture for rent, he says.

Architecture typically plays a prominent role in Arsham's works, which often explores the relationships between the man-made and the natural.

Arsham says he's looking forward to opening his studio to visitors and focusing some of the attention of Art Basel Miami Beach onto the artists, as opposed to the collectors, curators and gallery owners.