Another highlight from the Scope Art Fair in Miami this year came from the Hous Projects Gallery. This New York based gallery brought work from several interesting artists, but the clear stand out was the photographer Marian Drew. Drew uses masterfully lit scenes of bounty to slowly awaken the viewer to the horrors of human destruction. Her photographs reference Renaissance still life, with beautiful fruit and fauna paired with small cadavers of wombats, possums and marsupials found by the roadside. Her painterly photographs allow the viewer to be drawn in by the beauty of her image to be confronted by the lives of these tiny creatures, which have died at the hand of the human race.

Drew graduated from the Canberra School of Art in Australia, with a post-graduate study from the Kassel University in Germany. Since, she has worked with several prestigious galleries in Australia and the US, including the Fremantle Arts Center in Washington, the Robin Gibson Gallery in Sydney, Australia and the Dianne Tanzer Gallery in Melbourne, Australia.

Sometimes, the most impressive work on display in Miami during the the first week of December isn’t found in one of the Miami Art Fairs. This was certainly the case for the exhibition, Heavy Manner, by Luis Gispert. The exhibition, which opened last night at the Fredric Snitzer Gallery, included several large format photographs, sound sculptures, and a 26-minute film, titled Smother. The exhibition stood out among countless other works of art currently on view in Miami, and emerged to be one of the most impressive collections of the week. Gispert’s newest photographs continue to explore the saturation of ostentatious wealth and cultural naivete that are often associated with Miami. Constructing images that are loaded with cultural references, the artist sets the viewer in a first person perspective from the back seat of strange and intricately fabricated vehicles, such as his image KnightRider. With many of the images reaching over ten feet in length, the viewer is set in an almost true to life scaled version of these seemingly hypothetical scenarios. The sound sculptures wait silently until a viewer passes through them before they belt out aggressive bass tones which seem to certainly reference Miami bass tracks of the nineties.

Luis Gispert was raised in Miami during the late seventies and eighties and experienced first-hand the cultural qualities of the area. He completed his MFA at Yale University School of Art and was included in the Whitney Biennial in 2002. The artist has exhibited extensively and internationally with the recent show El Mundo Es Tuyo (the world is yours) having opened this year at Zach Feuer Gallery and Mary Boone Gallery in New York and a survey exhibition of the artist’s work opening at the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami in 2009.

Wandering through the caverns of the Miami Art Fairs can allow you to miss what is right in front of you. One of this year’s standouts came from Allison Schulnik, showing with the Mike Weiss Gallery in the Scope Art Fair. Using a Guston-influenced meaty texture and a spontaneous gesture, Schulnik’s paintings reference folklore and fairy tale through the mind of an animator. Her subject matter ranges from cats and skeletons to the still life and hobo clowns, but all rely on an innate gesture that makes them gripping and highly emotive. Her subjects have a intense glare, which reference the greatest of the classic Dutch portraits. Her shows consist of paintings and paper pieces, combined with small ceramic sculptures and beautiful stop motion animated films.

Schulnik received her BFA from CalArts in Experimental Animation in 2000 and since then, she has been named by Art Review as one of their “Future Greats,” and had features in ArtSlant and Whitehot Magazine. In 2007, she had two major solo shows with the Rokeby Gallery in London and the Mark Moore Gallery in Santa Monica, California. In 2009, she is scheduled for two upcoming shows with the Unosunove in Rome and Galerie Huebner in Frankfurt, Germany.

Over the next 5 days, DailyServing.com will be reporting from Miami Beach, covering the myriad of art events surrounding the 2008 Art Basel Miami Beach. Opening today at the Miami Beach Convention Center, Art Basel is often called the most important art event in the United States. Art Basel Miami Beach pulls the US art world into southern Florida for four days every year over the first weekend of December. The event will bring together over 250 leading art galleries from around the world, exhibiting works by over 2,000 of the most exciting 20th and 21st century artists. In addition to the Art Basel, countless other fairs have emerged offering both quality and quantity of works to be viewed. Some of the most noteworthy of these fairs are Pulse Miami, Scope Miami, Aqua Art Miami and the NADA art fair. If you are not in the US, or will simply miss this year’s art frenzy in Miami, be sure to catch Art 40 Basel which takes place this June in Basel, Switzerland.

Opening earlier this month at Connor Contemporary Art in Washington DC is a solo exhibition of new large format drawings by Zoe Charlton, on view until January 3, 2009. The exhibition, entitled Family, shows concurrently at Connor Contemporary with solo shows of work by David Levinthal and Gabriel de la Mora. Formerly, Charlton’s drawings have been more intimate in size, as seen at Nathan Larramendy Gallery in California and at past shows in DC, drawing the viewer as close as possible to experience the delicate nuances of each figure. In Family, Charlton is working much larger, on mainly 60 x 40 inch paper, boasting life-drawn portraits of the artist’s female cousins. In typical Charlton manner, the women exist within a sort of contextless setting in which subtle cues lead the viewer to form ideas about who is being represented and what the artist is trying to say. However, this time Charlton focuses on her Floridian family members rather than the more abstract, and historically based figures of her previous work, and the backgrounds remain a pristine white. Again the women of Rubenesque proportion are found in positions sure to raise any eyebrow or blush any cheek. The delicately depicted women, in graphite and splashes of gauche, remind you of what makes Charlton’s work so sensual and disturbing, but as seen through a veil of virtue unique to this new body of work.

Zoe Charlton received her MFA from the University of Texas at Austin and her BFA from Florida State University. Her work has been exhibited at The Baltimore Museum of Art, Mixed Greens in New York, Wendy Cooper Gallery in Chicago and is in the collection of the Studio Museum of Harlem, among others.

On view now at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Chicago, until February 22, 2009, is Joseph Grigely’s exhibition St. Cecilia. St. Cecilia presents work from the nearly fifteen-year career of this internationally recognized artist, who is currently living and working in Chicago, and represents the various media with which he works, including video, sound, sculpture, and works on paper, to explore the poignancy and humor of miscommunication. Amongst the eleven works on view are two created in collaboration with Amy Vogel: Something Say (1999) and You (2001).

Throughout the exhibition Grigely (American, b. 1956) explores the nuances between seeing and hearing highlighted by a major new video installation, St. Cecilia, which anchors this exhibition. Named after the patron saint of music, the installation features two single channel video projections with footage of the Baltimore Choral Arts Society singing three traditional Christmas carols with new lyrics written by Grigely to convey what he calls “lip misreading” — identical lip formations that produce dissimilar sounds. The artist’s overarching intent is to make works that create a situation where hearing people experience linguistic misunderstandings from a similar point of view as a deaf person, through points of familiarity such as television shows, Christmas carols, and post-it notes.

St. Cecilia was co-organized by the Contemporary Museum, Baltimore, and The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs. Joseph Grigely’s new video installation, St. Cecilia, is co-produced by the Contemporary Museum and the Orange County Museum of Art. The MCA presentation is organized by Julie Rodrigues Widholm, Pamela Alper Associate Curator.

“Are you angry or are you boring?” Gilbert and George facetiously asked in 1977, the words scrawled across the top of a fiery, 16-panel image. Their point is unmistakable: you should be angry. If you’re not, you’re probably being negligently complacent.

The same question could be posed to the work in California’s 2008 Biennial, but with a strikingly different effect. Is the art angry or boring? In this Biennial, the two don’t necessarily combat each other. In fact, the best moments are both boring and angry, unpretentiously resistant in their refusal to be grandiloquent.

Todd Gray, Kara Tanaka, Crushed by the Hammer of the Sun, Courtesy of the artist

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