Miami Beach: Zarouhie Abdalian, Simon Denny, Jessica Dickinson, Liam Everett, Matt Keegan, Koak, Shinpei Kusanagi, Devin Leonardi, Trevor Paglen, Will Rogan, Sara VanDerBeek

Utilizing a technique reminiscent of traditional Japanese nijimi, Kusanagi stains untreated canvas with layers of translucent color. Incorporating improvisational brushstrokes in vivid hues, the compositions hover on the surface and then recede into deep space. 

 

Kusanagi’s landscapes evoke familiar urban and natural scenes, such as sidewalks, windows, trees, foliage and flowers, clouds, and the sea. Yet, they simultaneously ask viewers to imagine an unknown “elsewhere” that expands outside our world. His atmospheric washes of color leave the paintings devoid of specific detail, conjuring expansive memories of time and place.

Liam Everett’s painting practice, while formally abstract, is deeply rooted in the language of natural light, the scale of the Northern California landscape, and the shifting conditions of the environment within his studio. 

"I have begun to view painting as a flexible topography, one that discloses the subtleties of being with a high level of transparency. Enabling this way of seeing is the practice of practice in which the solo contingency is movement, even when the image presents itself in stillness."

 

— Liam Everett

“These images of clouds are taking the idea [of] literally looking at the cloud. They are images that have been run through algorithms but when you apply these systems to clouds they are not designed for that so they kind of freak out.”

 

 

— Trevor Paglen, Interview with Kristen Knupp, 2019

Trevor Paglen’s work deliberately blurs lines between science, art, journalism, and other disciplines to construct unfamiliar yet meticulously researched ways to see and interpret the world around us. 

 

The overwhelming majority of images are now made by machines for other machines and exist as data never intended to be read by human eyes. Paglen’s photographs delve into this contemporary condition and raise questions about the implications of this shift towards ways of seeing promulgated by technology. 

Engaging hierarchies of gender as well as form, Koak interrogates commonly held cultural assumptions defining women as passive objects of desire. 

 

Drawing on the visual vocabulary of comics, Koak’s exquisite technique allows her mark-making to appear beautifully effortless, but is in fact the result of a rare type of generous and hand-made master craftsmanship.

“This sense that there is a quality of impermanence to our progress [as women] leads me to photography. Specifically I’m referring to its expansive and elastic nature, its space for experimentation and its ‘democratic’ nature.”

 

 

— Sara VanDerBeek, “On Defiance: Experimentation as Resistance,” Aperture, 2016

Focusing on nature, Will Rogan entangles his work with organic elements and ecological processes, rejecting culture's standards for quantifying and tracking time and instead celebrating the varying timelines found in nature; from the duration of a season, to the eons of the polar ice caps.

Matt Keegan’s interdisciplinary practice explores the relationship between image, language, cognition, and identity. His work examines the ways in which language, while bound to specific cultural and historical circumstances, is always shifting along with our changing ideas and positions.

 

In this suite of new work, Keegan meticulously extracted individual items for sale — their prices prominently displayed — from weekly grocery advertisements, organizing them into an intuitive associative system of his own invention.

In 2018, Amazon filed a patent for the construction of a warehouse worker’s cage designed to confine an employee as the cage is remotely steered by an algorithmic system. Denny models components of the patent renderings, intricately cutting their contours and glueing layers of printed pages to strike a balance between form, information, and graphic.