“Backyard Paradise” at Swampspace combined art and a backyard outing with friends into a great night of fun on Friday, September 13^th, 2013.

What could be better than an exhibition of some of Miami’s best artists, giant soap bubbles, battered and fried alligator personally caught by the curator and slices of fresh pineapple and watermelon all on one evening? Nothing! It was a perfect summer night in the 305.

Curated by Johnny Laderer, the exhibit featured works by Dogan Arslanoglu, Bhakti Baxter, Justin Cooper, Giles Neale, Gustavo Oviedo, Johnny Robles, Rachel Rossin and
George Sanchez Calderon.

Swampspace announced:

Today, however, Americans work more than any other industrialized nation. We enjoy far less leisure time.

Situationist International identified leisure in a capitalist society as illusory; not free time, but rather a commodity sold back to the individual. Compartmentalizing lives is a farce. Constant work, society is convinced, creates to more time for leisure.

Time available for leisure varies from one society to the next, although anthropologists have found that early man and hunter-gatherer societies had significantly more leisure time than people in more complex (modern) societies. Europeans on arrival to America saw natives as lazy. Today American society has taken it one step further with increasingly less time for leisure than their European counterparts.

In many ways, the backyard and leisure go hand-in-hand to the point of interchangeability.

Functioning as spaces for more personalized and often kitschy expressions of an idealized paradise, the manicured façade for the world in the front yard occasions private expression in the backyard, or, as they say: “Business in the front, party in the back.”

Backyard Paradise presents artists whose lives and work seem to blend seamlessly.

Whatever their passions or interpretations of leisure may be, their efforts to live life holistically are reflected herein. Their work examines the relationship between the backyard and everything that might appear on a postcard: sailing, reading, gardening, fishing, BBQing, surfing, golfing, swimming, sunbathing, playing tennis, or swinging in a hammock. “You visit; we live it!”

Guccivuitton presented Hugo Montoya's second solo exhibition in Miami, “Cause living just isn't enough,” an exhibition consisting of four new artworks that evoke marginally concealed social tensions through their menacing monumental physicality. True to Montoya's past endeavors each of these works exists in a contradicting space that is both flippant and earnest, while demanding a performative confrontation with their audience.

Stolen Boulder, a 300 lb concrete cast boulder suspended on a thin steel rod, which is formally and pragmatically Sisyphean, recalls Ovid's tale of Ephyra's infamous king's respite during Orpheus' song to Eurydice. The suspended boulder, pitting man's engineering against the natural law of gravity, and the seemingly inadequate rod, like Orpheus unavailing song, propose the troubling inevitability that eventually and rightfully the rock will come crashing down to the floor beneath it. The end result provides an astoundingly implausible tension that invites closer observation as well as instinctually activates the desire to flee.

Clay excavated from deposits in a previous Jim Crow era "colored-only" beach on Virginia Key slathered over a thin monolith-like wall harkening the artifacts in Stanley Kubrick's, "2001: A Space Odyssey", constitute the piece, Black Beach. Like the artifact from 2001, the piece acts as a silent specter to an early experiment that lead to a paradigm shift in Miami's racial narrative. The deeply pitted and cracked pachyderm-like surface of the dried clay offers an emotive insight into the sentiment of 1945 when civil rights activists staged a "wade-in" at the white's only Baker's Haulover Beach which eventually led to the establishment of a "colored-only" area.

While Montoya's work broaches the darkness of contemporary life, his playful and creative insight and mischievous approach to materiality quenches our appetites for hopeful avenues and options to everyday situations. In a way, artists like Montoya propose that art and wit, above politically complicated best-intentioned solutions, offer the more generous possibility of a humane and progressive outlook.

“The Collabo Show” was “Back by Popular Demand” for one night only in a warehouse space in Wynwood. Part of a series of one day exhibitions dedicated to collaborative engagements among artists “The Collabo” featured more than 100 Miami-based artists like Bhakti Baxter, Agustina Woodgate, Johnny Robles, Sinisa Kukec, Onajide Shabaka, Franky Cruz, Gustavo Oviedo, Magnus Sodamin, David Rohn and Hugo Montoya.

The forth installment of the artist-run exhibitions that began in 2005 brought together artists with a wide range of practices. Engaging, interactive and experimental the art in “The Collabo” was all about enjoying art for art’s sake. The audience was invited to participate and immerse themselves and essentially become collaborators in creating a truly artistic, creative and self-exploratory experience.

Originally conceived after spontaneous collaborations at dinner parties the event always takes place in the middle of the blistering Miami summer hosted in a different space each time. Selected artists are encouraged to challenge their individual practices and enter a realm of co-experimentation. As a result, the majority of the works have been performative and interactive in nature, culminating into a vibrant and jovial happening.

The art engaged and involved the viewer on different levels. Some pieces were very personal, solitary experiences that fostered a one-on-one interaction between art and viewer, whilst other pieces were geared towards interactive, shared group experiences.

Sodamin’s project “Illuminations” aimed to explore a collaboration between painting performance, light and sound. Painted dancers Katie Stirman and Jenna Balfe were immersed in a large-scale Day-Glo painted background through movement and interaction with each other to the sound of echoing guitar loops. Movements were minimal as the dancers responded to each others gestures, never physically touching yet connected in movement and spirit. Says Sodamin, “Through patterns of repetition the piece brings focus on mimicry in nature and the animal instinct to change and adapt to the environment.” He adds, “As the large rorschach patterns in the background seem to reference spinal or pelvic areas, the dancers float the idea of their personal space and structure. Both, innocent and daring, the piece years to call to a primal past from which man has emerged..”

"Ive been trying to reverse the state of childhood into adulthood with some of my works. Also attempting to retrace ambiguous memories or feelings of my childhood and my fascination with science and nature. It starts out with daydreaming, which most adults don’t do anymore, instead play in there minds. I thought it would be appropriate to create something where people can play out loud for others as well for themselves to experience.”

The most popular piece of the night was a collaboration between Johnny Robles, Giancarlo Sardone and John McMahon. Paint-filled balloons were attached to a large-scale canvas and the anticipating crowd people was asked to use a slingshot to fire marble rocks at the balloons and thereby release the paint and be part of the creation of an abstract rainbow-colored painting entitled “Recreation Paint.” The artists encourage active engagement by the viewers, who each leave their mark

Explains Robles, “The soul of ‘Recreation Paint’ resides in its psychological implications: the piece presents itself to viewers with no pretensions. It is a work that needs no plaque to explain its intentions, they become obvious when the viewer's gaze drifts downward where they find laying at their feet a bag of marble pebbles and a bin of white slingshots. Pairing this nostalgic set of tools with the image of paint filled balloons, whose pattern is reminiscent of thermal imaging scans, the viewer concludes that their role is greater than that of mere spectator: they can shape what the piece becomes.”

Gutierrez originally collaborated with Angelica Vergel, who is getting her masters in Media Studies at the New School in NYC. Gutierrez made a playlist on Spotify titled "Work" with songs that were titled "Work," "Werk," "Werq," "Werqing," and even "Professional." All songs, mere images of effort, are a call to "work" or reference expectations of someone else "working." Vergel made a YouTube playlist titled "WORK" and found similar video clips from all these random and crazy sources.

David Rohn was part of a attention-grabbing, obnoxious-on-purpose and in-your-face troupe of performance artists based in and around a white tent inside the warehouse. The performance, involving drag queens, clowns and divas, was an entertaining exploration of presence, personal space, social class, American society structure and narcissism, especially in the age of social media. Inhabiting their own space within the tent, an exclusive space for a selected view, the performers made relevant statements asking the audience to think about a culture that creates “elites, “ whether the rich and powerful, politically influential or celebrities.

The “Closed Circuit” performance combined fun and serious ideas into a captivating performance as the audience observed a VIP party in the tent with champagne, cake and music. Only few were invited but you can check out the photos on Facebook and Instagram later to see what an awesome party you missed because you weren’t on the list. The divas love themselves and took a lot of photos while you had to dust the flour and cake crumbs off your clothes and wipe the smashed grapes off your shoes.

Hedges collaborated with Kevin Arrow for the third time, turning their initial idea into a series. The first collaboration was “Breakfast,” followed by “Lunch” and now “Dinner” for the latest edition of “The Collabo.”