An Art Basel Notebook
The future, with all its unknowables, can cause us to dream or to feel anxiety.
These disparate reactions to the future are the central theme in the exhibition The Possibility of an Island, which opened Thursday at the Museum of Contemporary Art's Wynwood annex, MOCA at Goldman Warehouse.
The exhibition, curated by Ruba Katrib, an assistant curator for MOCA, was inspired by The Possibility of an Island by French author Michel Houellebecq.
Katrib said the exhibition is not an attempt to illustrate the novel, nor do any of the works reference it.
Instead, the artists picked up on the themes addressed in the book: sexuality, everlasting life, death and destruction, among others.
In one work, New York artist Peter Coffin created an amorphous blob peppered with colored lights and attached to a corner of a gallery. To Your Scattered Bodies Go is eerily magnetic.
New York artist Julika Rudelius also has created a work that is hard to pull away from: the film, Forever, in which wealthy, older women discuss their lives, and in the process reveal their fears and anxieties about aging and beauty.
Miami artist Nicolas Lobo took perhaps the greatest leap in executing his work.
Lobo, who joined the Raelian Movement while working on the project, used three terrazzo tiles inlaid with what appear to be crop circles. The tiles are actually floor plans, the first physical manifestation of a future embassy for the Raelian Movement.
''I've been fascinated with them for a while,'' Lobo said of the Raelians.
-- DANIEL CHANG
RUBELL GUESTS CONSUME ART WITH A SIDE OF CEREALLife stylist Jennifer Rubell, along with domino mag, hosted a breakfast for art fans at the Rubell Family Collection on Thursday that brought back childhood memories of school mornings.
The retro menu, designed to complement an exhibit called 30 Americans, consisted of 500 boxes of cereal, 2,000 bananas, 250 half-gallon containers of milk and coffee brewing in 20 coffee makers.
The exhibit features 200 works of art by African-American artists, including Miami's Purvis Young, spread across the entire 45,000-square-foot exhibition space.
''When I got to know the artists and looked at their biographies, I realized they all grew up middle class and grew up eating what we all ate: cold cereal, bananas and milk,'' Rubell said.
domino mag editor in chief Deborah Needleman said the breakfast is as much about art as food.
''The breakfast concept is so genius, simple and clever,'' Needleman said.
30 Americans, which has evolved to include 31 artists and explores the kaleidoscopic black experience, is the sum of the Rubell's mission to collect the most interesting art of the times.
Rubell said: ''This exhibit is driven simply by my family's seeing great works in African-American art studios.'' -- AUDRA D.S. BURCH
SIX ARTISTS AT PLAY IN A YARD IN WYNWOODCasaLin is a private house in Wynwood, but during Art Basel its yard becomes an outdoor art gallery. (The place is owned by Miami collector Lin Lougheed, who rents it to an amenable family.) During the Basel hullabaloo, the yard offers a welcome respite.
This year's instillation features works by six local artists who have reworked materials in ways other than originally intended. Ralph Provisero uses jet fairings as planters bursting with flame-like crotons. Frances Trombly ''toilet papers'' a tree with strips of cotton she has embroidered as part of her ongoing exploration of throwaways. Metto Tommerup creates a haven-within-a-haven by draping an existing hut with epiphytes. Leyden Rodriguez Casanova makes a play on painter Frank Stella with a geometric-patterned deck in a working-class rendition of minimalism. Julie Davidow said she worked her fingers to the bone making her spider's web of manila rope, which will disintegrate and return to the Earth.
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