We continue this week’s coverage with Benjamin Bellas’ review of the experimental projects at SEVEN.

William Lamson. Photo courtesy of the artist.

In the process of trekking from one designated fair to another during Art Basel Miami Beach weekend, one encounters a litany of individuals, vendors, and spaces trying to grab your attention from amongst the morass.  In the Wynwood District situated along the walking path, (for those who hadn’t the patience to wait for the shuttle from Scope to Pulse), was one such space that was the gem of all of Art Basel.

Since 2006, Pierogi Gallery, Hales Gallery and Ronald Feldman Fine Arts have presented a special exhibition during the art fair week in Miami.  This year BravinLee programs, Postmasters, P•P•O•W, and Winkleman galleries have joined the original three in a new 24,000-square-foot space in the Wynwood Art District. Entitled SEVEN, this expanded project looks beyond the art fair model to create an alternative platform for presenting and experiencing contemporary art.   Defined by large installations and collaborative curatorial projects, SEVEN has been conceived to provide an exhibition experience defined by the needs of each artist’s work.  The viewing experience is much more that of a biennial than the one we have grown accustomed to at the traditional art fair.

Amongst the numerous large scale video projections presented within the cavernous exhibition space was William Lamson’s A Line Describing the Sun. An exquisitely documented land art installation/performance whereby Lamson uses a mirror and Fresnel lens, mounted to a wheeled device, to harness the sun’s rays in order to melt the mud of a dry lake bed into glass-like arcing line.  The video, having recently been on exhibit at Pierogi’s Boiler space with a 23-foot scale model of the line created, lacks nothing without it’s sculptural counterpart.

David Herbert, Monarch, 2008. Chicken wire, spray foam, plaster bandages, chrome paint, plywood, hardware, colored paper, steel 8 x 8 x 12 feet. Photo courtesy of the artist.

On the other end of the spectrum, in terms of process and content, was David Herbert’s Monarch.  The work is doubly hilarious in it’s would be life size depiction of The Alien seemingly napping in an over-sized rocking chair while a monarch butterfly lands on its wrist, and in its impressive use of foundation level materials: chicken wire, spray foam, plaster bandages, chrome paint, plywood, hardware, colored paper, steel. Other standout works from a strong field of contenders included Kelly Heaton‘s The Fashionista, and Sam Van Aken‘s, Oh My God.

Asked why they were expanding the effort this year, Pierogi Gallery’s Joe Amrhein replied, “Why not? We are not challenging the ubiquitous tradition of the ‘Art Fair’ but think we can improve upon it, especially in Miami with its unique possibilities. If you feel that most people who visit the fairs really want something that allows for a different, more comprehensive interaction, it shouldn’t surprise you that artists and their dealers feel the same way.”  Now let’s just all hope that the fair organizers feel the same way.

Bryan Graf, Lake Accumulation 2010, c-print, 13 x 19 inches- Curator, Kate Greenberg & Hilary Schaffner

I love how far the term “curate” has fallen. Once particular to egg-headed museum types who cared for collections of rarities, now curating, at least in marketing terms, means nothing more than making a kind of fancy or personalized choice. Instead of plain old dinner and a movie, you can now curate the best locavorian burger and artisanal fries while selecting a companion film from your finely tuned Netflix queue.

In the art world, strains of this populist streak were found in Roberta Smith’s recent assail against New York museums’ predilection toward chilly post-minimalism. Coining the term “curator’s art,” Smith called into question the blitz of retrospectives of artists like Roni Horn, Robert Smithson, and Gabriel Orozco that as she put it, “share a visual austerity and coolness of temperature that are dispiritingly one-note.” She added that while she liked these shows, she also wants to see shows by artists whose work belies an intense personal necessity. I took this to mean that she wants to see the same level of passion on museum walls that some employ in everyday decisions such as where to eat.

With this criteria in mind, I judged Young Curators, New Ideas III to mostly be heading in the right direction. Each curator or curatorial team was given their own section of the gallery that they treated like an individual show.  The overall result looks like your average M.F.A. Thesis exhibition, but there were a couple of standouts.

Bryan Graf, An Encyclopedia of Gardening, 1969 2010, two panels of hardcover book covers, 24 x 32 inches each - Curator, Kate Greenberg & Hilary Schaffner

Broken Lattice, featuring the work of Bryan Graf, curated by Kate Greenberg and Hilary Schaffner, feels both cohesive and well varied. Graf uses a multitude of photographic techniques to convey a distant sense of place and memory.  He borrows heavily from the James Welling playbook, but it’s OK, as his intention feels pure and the curators seem humble. The works are given just enough space to breathe easily and the relaxed pace of the installation is completely in sync with the laid-back vibe of Graf’s photography. You can get lost in a floor piece, peer into a smaller work, and lean over a table of seemingly found snapshots—in total, a satisfying experience.

Jan Tichy, Installation No. 5 (Threshold) 2008, three-channel digital video projection, one hundred 250g white paper objects, variable dimensions- Curator, Gabriella Hiatt

Another respite from the competing voices in this show was Jan Tichy’s Installation No. 5 (Threshold), curated by Gabriella Hiatt. Here, four walls of a darkened gallery are adorned with common cardboard tubes and cylindrical lids. After languishing in the dark for a while, the walls are blasted with rectangles of projected white light that transforms the tubes into what looks like the austere post-minimal abstraction of, say, Gabriel Orozco.  Then a layer of black lines snake onto these objects and transforms them once again. Although it’s a bit theatrical, I like how the references in this work slip between DIY craft, high abstraction, mapping, and biological systems.

The rest of Young Curators/ New Ideas III feels a bit scattered. Some of the work that I liked, such as Victor Vaughn’s digital prints, suffered from bad placement and odd context.  Too much of the other work on view bears the heavy influence of grad school obsessions like Marcel Broodthaers, Felix Gonzáles-Torres and Christian Marclay. While it is difficult to know whom to blame for the less successful parts of the show, the artist or the curator, in the best installations it feels as if the curator simply placed the work into a complimentary context and then got out of the way.

Maybe all of the hardworking museum curators out there are over-thinking it. For instance, we shouldn’t need to read a laborious wall label to experience great art. Although Young Curators, New Ideas III misses in parts, it spares us from heady essays and shows how selection, placement, and juxtaposition can go a long way.

Currently on view at P.P.O.W Gallery in New York is the three-person exhibition, Debris, which features the work of Sarah Frost, Portia Munson and Aurora Robson. For Debris, each artist has contributed a large scale installation, constructed of discarded plastic refuse and fashioned into a thing of visual interest, a bastion of beauty. The overarching dialog surrounds the issue of sustainability and the negative impacts that such waste has on the environment, but each piece manifests the message—and the material of plastic—uniquely.

Portia Munson’s Pink Project: Mound is reconstructed for the first time since its inaugural viewing in the 1994 New Museum exhibition, Bad Girls, where as P.P.O.W notes, the piece was originally reviewed almost entirely as a treatise on feminism rather than the environment.” It is constructed of an overwhelming, well curated collection of pinkparaphernalia—found objects ranging from women’s wigs and combs to toys and pacifiers—laid out neatly on a tabletop. Her 2009 piece, Green Piece: Sarcophagus, has a sort of Damien Hirst-esque quality, an embalming of monochromatic objects (this time, green) in a see-through tank. Sarah Frost’s QWERTY is made up of 60,000 discarded computer keys, and Aurora Robson’s Belch combines discarded plastic bottles with other found objects to create an enormous wet-looking puff of slick black waste.

Portia Munson, Green Piece: Sarcophagus (2009) salvaged green plastic, tempered glass and recycled wood

Portia Munson’s work has been exhibited widely, including at White Columns, New York and Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Finland. She earned her MFA at the Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ. Sarah Frost is included in the 2010 Great Rivers Biennial at the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis, MO. She earned her MFA at Southern Illinois University. Aurora Robson has exhibited widely, including at the Architecture and Design Museum, Los Angeles and Project 4 Gallery, Washington, DC. She earned her BA at Columbia University, New York.