Between the legible and the opaque: Approaches to an ideal in place proposes works of various media that incorporate abstraction as both a formal and conceptual framework to render perceptions of place. The use of abstraction facilitates readings of the process inherent in their making. This process involves elements that reference diverse notions of place – its color, materiality, use of language, and instantaneity as landscape. The summation of these notions, a conversation between the work as a whole and its constituent parts, contributes to varying degrees of legibility and evocativeness.
The insistence on these notions of place, although sometimes imperceptible, contextualizes the artworks in the exhibition. The “place” referenced in the artworks is not bound to a restrictive specificity; rather, in them resides the possibility for multiplicity of readings produced by the artists’ own meaning-making strategies and those of the viewer who interprets them. The use of abstraction then, functions as a vehicle for a host of associations, for the continuous interpretation of something that is not quite what it seems to be.
The participating artists are Liene Bosquê, Jenny Brillhart, Jude Broughan, Alain Castoriano, Robert Chambers, Irina Dakhnovskaia-Lawton, Lucia Del Sanchez, Genderfail, Ivan Grilo, Xavier Luján, Marron et Masqué, Juan Matos, Nicole Maynard-Sahar, Tana Oshima, Alice Quaresma, Marielle Plaisir, Carrie Sieh, Gerbi Tsesarskaia, and Cristina Victor.
Adler Guerrier (born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti; lives and works in Miami, FL) is best known for works in photography, drawing, and printmaking that explore the poetics and politics of place. Guerrier received a BFA from New World School of the Arts/University of Florida. His recent exhibitions include Coffee, Rhum, Sugar, & Gold: A Postcolonial Paradox (Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco), curated by Larry Ossei-Mensah and Dexter Wimberly, La Construcción de lo Posible, XIII Havana Biennial (Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Wifredo Lam, Havana), and Lines of Fracture (David Castillo Gallery, Miami). Guerrier is a resident artist at the Bakehouse Art Complex and a board member of Oolite Arts and Locust Projects.