Events: July 18, 2019

A Mordida (The Bite) Neves Marques's first solo museum presentation in the United States encompasses an audio-visual installation featuring a set of new films commissioned by PAMM, digital animations, and an ambient sound piece produced by London-based musician Fraencis. Based on research done at a laboratory for genetically modified mosquitos in São Paulo, Neves Marques creates fictional and abstract narratives that question the role of gender in the history of science. The installation evokes an eerie feeling of collapse between biological epidemics and political crisis, specifically seeking to reflect the current alarming spread of intolerant conservative politics in Brazil.

The control and militarization of gender portrayed in the mosquito laboratory is paralleled through the films' three main characters a man, a woman, and a transgender woman as they navigate an intimate relationship. Veering between the sterile environment of the lab and scenes that depict nature and contact between bodies, Neves Marques poetically suggests intimacy, affection, and acceptance as sensitivities to be preserved in times of hostility.

Pedro Neves Marques received an MA in art and politics from Goldsmiths, University of London, and a BA in fine arts from University of Lisbon. He has had solo presentations of his work at Museu Coleção Berardo, Lisbon; e-flux, New York (with Mariana Silva); and EDP Foundation, Lisbon (with Andre Romão). His work has been included in group presentations including the 2018 Triennial: Songs for Sabotage, New Museum, New York, and at SculptureCenter, New York; Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, New York; Anthology Film Archives, New York; Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris; Kadist Art Foundation, Paris; Tate Modern, London; V-A-C Foundation, Venice; Parco Arte Vivente, Turin; Casa do Povo, São Paulo; Sursock Museum, Beirut; Times Museum, Guangzhou; Fundacion Botin, Santander, Spain; and Serralves Museum, Porto; and Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (MAAT), Lisbon. Neves Marques is the editor of The Forest and the School: Where to Sit at the Dinner Table? (2014), an anthology on Brazilian Antropofagia from an anthropological perspective, and author of two short story collections, most recently Morrer na America (2017). He is cofounder of inhabitants-tv.org, an online channel for exploratory video and documentary reporting. He lives and works in New York.

Fraencis is a music producer, sound researcher and former psychiatrist working across the fields of experimental electronic music, affect and embodied music cognition. He is currently undertaking a MA in music at Goldsmiths, University of London.

ARTIST BIOS:

Aiyah Sibay’s Bio:
Aiyah is a poet, photographer, and traveler, and the daughter of Syrian immigrants. She has worked as a reporter, columnist, and photographer for various publications, and traveled around the world to work with refugees and to photograph different cultures and ways of life. Aiyah is tremendously passionate about art and writing and using the two to speak against injustices, prejudices, stereotypes, and oppression. She hopes to always achieve that in her own work.

Vivian Koppelman’s Bio:
As a teacher of 40+ years, Vivian learned to look at her students with an eye to their personalities and ways of learning. She has taken that training and applied it to her photography. She started training in Photography at New Haven School for Photography, where she used to develop her pictures in a bathroom. The photographs she submitted to the Long Island Arts Council show were selected along with 31 others out of 350 submissions.

Vivian has been taking photographs as an amateur for over 45 years. After training for a while in acrylic painting, she realized that she preferred working with the camera and interacting with subjects. Her training at the New Haven School of Photography led her into darkroom work for a professional photographer, but she realized that her interest was in capturing the moment, not producing someone else’s work. For Vivian, photography is a personal art form, where the emotional impact of the image is as important as the subject.

Haque was a professional papermaker at Dieu Donné, a renowned studio in Manhattan where she collaborated with dozens of artists to create new works in handmade paper. Prior to that, she was a papermaker, bookbinder and faculty member at the Brodsky Center for Innovative Editions at Rutgers University. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in Interdisciplinary Book and Paper Arts from Columbia College Chicago. She taught in Cortona, Italy through the University of Georgia Study Abroad Program, and at many institutions throughout the U.S. She has shown her artwork nationally and in Tokyo, Japan and Fabriano, Italy.

Haque’s works are currently on view in Spheres of Meaning: An Exhibition of Artists’ Books. Come by the museum today to view these works and join us for her free talk at Books & Books Coral Gables.

The artist’s site-specific construction addresses the role that Florida itself has played in the history of rocketry and the impact the project of space travel has made on the state’s cultural, political, economic, and physical landscape. It offers a portal into narratives that embody intersections between and across gendered associations that are culturally attributed to the mechanical. And, engaging directly with both personal and collective histories, this project examines the complex web of influences that have shaped both real and imagined relationships between human and non-human beings and objects.

About the Artist

Whitney Humphreys is a San Francisco Bay Area artist and teacher currently pursuing a double Masters in San Fransisco Art Institute’s Dual Degree program, where she has held the position of 2018 Co-Director for the Legion of Graduate Students. Upon completion, she will earn an MFA in studio practice, with a focus in printmaking and sculptural installation, as well as an MA in the History and Theory of Contemporary Art with her thesis titled Gendered Machines.

Opening Reception: Jul 13, 2019, 6 PM

The purpose of Beatriz Gonzalez: A Retrospective is thus to display the full breadth, range and sophistication of the artist's practice while seeking to dispel misconceptions about its position in the larger context of both Colombian and international Postwar art. Achieving this goal, however, entails rejecting upfront the generalized view of her work as a regional manifestation of international Pop Art in favor of a more nuanced interpretation of her practice vis-a-vis the cultural context from which it emerged. Working in Bogota, and thus impervious to the emergence of a Pop Art movement, Gonzalez's aim was not to celebrate postwar consumer culture but rather to investigate Colombian middle-class taste as well as the popular desire for and consumption of well-known European artworks. Declaring herself "a provincial painter," she called into question the subordinate relationship between marginal localities such as Colombia and the hegemonic centers of artistic and cultural production represented by Europe and the United States. Her work thus embodies both a reaction to this uneven relationship as well as a fresh starting point. From this point of view, Gonzalez's objective does not end with the predictable (and rather exhausted) critique of representation implicit in any form of appropriation; her project, instead, is grounded in a broader assessment of the state of culture in her homeland and its relationship to the persistent legacy of colonialism.

Beatriz Gonzalez: A Retrospective will offer an expansive look at the artist's unique and influential practice. Organized in a loose chronological order, the exhibition will include the artist's most iconic works, many of which have rarely been seen outside of Colombia. In this way it will trace the different stages in Gonzalez's creative and intellectual explorations of mass-media images as vehicles for her extremely personal approach to representing key facets of Colombian society and its relationship to Europe and the United States. These range from two-dimensional oil on canvas paintings, drawings, silkscreen prints, and curtains, to three-dimensional recycled furniture (beds, tables, night tables, cribs, armoires), and everyday objects (trays, TVs, cigar boxes). The works will be culled from the artists' personal collection as well as from public and private collections in Colombia, the United States and Europe.

In addition to her pioneering work with images recycled upon furniture and other supports, the exhibition also brings to light Gonzalez's political production of the last three decades when she systematically chronicled the violence perpetuated by "la violencia, her country's" decades long civil war, with an increased focus on indigenous, rural and displaced communities. While continuing to draw primarily from newspaper images and art historical sources, her recent paintings have become more complex in terms of composition as well as the use of collage to paint-in images taken from diverse media narratives and sources. While always innovative and unpredictable in terms of subject matter and artistic strategies, the depth and intensity of Gonzalez's sui generis approach to individual and collective grief is unparalleled in contemporary art.