Our collaborator CYJO attended Art Basel Miami and Miami Art Week which just ended. She kept her Journal there: here is the first part from Wednesday December 3, 2024.
Untitled, Wednesday, Dec 3rd, 2024
The morning bit sharp and clean at 58 degrees—the coldest it had felt all year. It cut through the stillness as I stood on the balcony, watering my monstera plant. It had an orange cast from the sunrise that stretched from behind the clouds, burning the edges of it into gold. Miami’s skies never disappoint. They’re theater every day, and they always demand your attention.
By afternoon, the city stirred with its usual rhythms: back-to-back traffic and the weight of a schedule pressing in. Crossing the MacArthur, and then turning onto Alton, I hit a red light. That’s when I saw Lori from Cultured magazine walking down the street.
Rolling down my window I called, “Lori!” She turned, surprised, her smile cutting through the noise. We’d met a while back, and I photographed her portrait in my studio. The light turned green, and no one honked, no one rushed us during this fleeting, connective moment.
This year, the photographic work at Untitled felt quieter, but still potent. Whether through fresh or seasoned eyes—it stitched together a collection of perspectives, each with their distinct tones.
Hands were the focus for some artists who shared a photographic series.
- LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies, Colombia University School of the Arts –
Shirin Neshat, Offerings, 2019
“Offerings is a series of photographs that are created in hand postures that borrow from common praying hand gestures from all religion including Islam. The text inscribed on the images is poetry by Omar Khayyam the great Persian poet and mystic from the 11th century.” – Shirin Neshat
“Born in Qazvin, Iran in 1957, Neshat arrived in the United States in 1974 to complete her education. She received a BA from the University of Berkeley in 1983 and has spent much of her adult life in exile, returning to Iran for the first time in 1993. Neshat’s photographs, videos and films have been exhibited widely in the United States and internationally at institutions including The Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Dallas Museum of Art, TX; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MI, among others. She has received numerous honors and awards for her work including First International Prize at the Venice Biennale in 1999 and the Infinity Award from the International Center for Photography, NY in 2002.”
- Galería Zielinsky – Vera Chaves Barcellos, Mãos na praia (Castelldefels), 1986
“From the beginning of her career, Vera Chaves Barcellos has been interested in the reuse of pre-existing images taken from the media to develop works through the languages of video, photography, engraving and installation. The starting point of the artist’s research is the relationship between the body and time: performing characters and narratives from the past and the future, focusing on stories that were left out of historiography, documenting and collecting archive materials from local events or from personal memory.
The artist presents the work Mãos na praia (Castelldefels) [Hands on the beach (Castelldefels)], photographed in 1986 on a beach in the province of Barcelona, Spain. We are led to witness, through the artist’s images, a collection of trace evidence: hands of different genders, with painted nails, adorned with jewelry, holding newspapers, hands suspended in the air, leaning against the body and resting on the ground.”
- Christine Park Gallery, Xyza Cruz Bacani, We are Like Air, 2013-2017
With Bacani, I thought about how important hands were to the domestic workers she documented.
“Bacani, who used to be a domestic worker herself, reclaims the story of the migrant worker that has been told countless times by others. This time around, she is telling their own story – not as victims but as champions who have overcome the many hardships life has tossed at them as they leave their families behind in their home country. The book portrays the experience of millions of mothers, daughters and families whose lives have been disrupted by migration. ‘We Are Like Air’ because migrant workers are often treated like air, invisible but important.
Xyza Cruz Bacani (b. 1987, the Philippines) is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist and writer based in New York. Her experience as a second-generation domestic worker in Hong Kong informs her practice and engagement in less visible, erased, and underreported world events. Her works explore migration, transnational identity, climate change, and labor.”
These three photographic series brought to mind Substructure (2010) (link to https:// www.cyjostudio.com/substructure-1), a project where my lens turned to internal migrants, capturing their stories and the textured, labor-worn gestures of their hands. It honored those who left their provinces for Beijing, seeking better lives. Living on the fringes of a pulsating city, their hard work contributed to the vitality of their community. There is a beauty to the deep power hands contribute to expression, creation and survival.
Cultural fusion and rituals were found in other works.
- MKG127, Jason Lujan, Origami Necklace, Donna with Menpo, 2022
“Toronto based, Jason Lujan is originally from Marfa, Texas. He creates tools for understanding and interpreting the processes by which different cultures approach each other as a result of travel and communication. Largely integrating visual components rooted in North America and Asia, his work focuses on the possibilities and limitations of the exchanging of ideas, meanings and values, questioning the concepts of authorship and authenticity. He is interested in interdisciplinary and trans-cultural crossovers between revitalization of historical methods, materials, and approaches combined with living in the present.
Just as previous generations of Indigenous artists responded to the introduction of modern art making materials and methods to record, reframe and recode traditional and new ideas, Lujan’s work emphasizes the transitive zone where the unfamiliar becomes familiar. Jason’s recent exhibitions have been hosted by the Art Gallery of Guelph, Denver Art Museum, Modern Fuel (Kingston, ON), Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, MacLaren Art Centre (Barrie, ON), Urban Shaman (Winnipeg, MB) and
Gallery 44 (Toronto). His work has been collected by The Smithsonian Museum of the American Indian and the Asian Pacific American Center, University of Texas, Guelph Art Gallery and TD Bank.”
- The Ant Project, Carina Mask, Untitled (Hiburi Kamakura), 2018
“Mask has explored spiritual epicenters throughout the countryside of Japan. For her forest portraits, she uses forests to symbolize a liminal space, a threshold between the physical and spiritual realms by capturing dense foliage, towering trees, and shifting light to evoke a sense of mystery and transition.”
Her fire portraits document the historic festival, Hiburi Kamakura of Kakunodate. The festival “began during the Edo period about 400 years ago. The ritual begins with priests praying and burning a pile of straw that’s been stacked three to four meters tall as an offering to the Deities. Farmers would wait until the sun set to light bales of hay on fire and swing them above their head and around their body in a circular motion in order to beckon a bountiful harvest and to scare off evil spirits that might linger from the previous year.
Carina Mask is a Japanese American photographer whose work explores the bridge of Eastern and Western culture. Based in South Florida, her work has taken her around the world, including visits to Japan’s ancient towns and sprawling cityscapes. Her first major foray into photographic storytelling was chronicling her grandparents’ decade- long struggle with dementia and the impact it had on the family of caregivers.”
Splashes of color lured me into the next two booths. I spoke with Kellie from Aperture to learn more about Arielle’s colorful portraits with turned or concealed heads.
- Aperture, Arielle Bobb-Willis, Keep the Kid Alive, 2015-2023
Kellie: “Arielle Bobb-WIllis is a young artist originally from New York working in and out of Los Angeles now. We first featured Arielle’s work in our project, The New Black Vanguard, edited by Antwaun Sargent. She has a chapter in the book and also was part of the traveling exhibition curated by Sargent as well. We loved the work and wanted to publish her first monograph, Aperture has a strong commitment to publishing artists first books, so we were very happy to add Keep the Kid Alive. (Link to https://aperture.org/ books/arielle-bobb-willis-keep-the-kid-alive/) to our list.”
“‘I became a photographer to step out of my depression in a a way that felt the most fulfilling’, says the artist, whose images have been published in the New Yorker, British Journal of Photography, and L’Uomo Vogue and exhibited in a 2018 solo exhibition, entitled Ever-Lucid, at Medium Tings gallery in Brooklyn.”
It was Jyll Bradley’s neon, minimalist sculptures and black and white images that made a lasting impression in her striking installation incorporating self-portraits (also with her face concealed) taken decades ago. Her images expressing vulnerability and exploration could have easily graced the cover of a Smiths album, and I couldn’t help but feel the essence from the music I embraced from the 80’s and 90’s like Erasure, Cocteau Twins, The Cure, Depeche Mode, etc.
- Pi Artworks, Jyll Bradley, Within A Budding Grove, 2024
“Self-Portrait (1987) hints at Bradley’s desire as a queer woman in the 1980’s to be seen and understood but also to hide away, obscuring her face from the camera and turning to abstraction in her art as a way to express the strange and unexpected.
Jyll Bradley (b.1966) in Folkestone, UK, lives and works in London, making installations, films, drawings and sculptures. Bradley’s work first emerged in the late 1980’s and combines the formal vigor of Minimalism with ideas of identity and place. Light has been a constant protagonist in her practice, from her early pioneering photographic light-box installations to her acclaimed large scale public realm works in fluorescent plexiglass and LED. Bradley often pairs organic and industrial materials, expressing a desire to bring together different aspects of self in a process she describes as ‘queering minimalism.’ Her installations have increasingly become sites of activities such as dance, performance and film-making reflecting her interest in sculpture as a potent gathering place of people and ideas.”
CYJO
About the writer: CYJO is a Korean American artist based in Miami whose work, since 2004, focuses on identity of person and place, exploring existing constructions of culture and categorizations. She is also co-founder of thecreativedestruction (link to https:// www.cyjostudio.com/aboutthecreativedestruction), an art collaborative with Timothy Archambault, and is a long-time contributor to L’oeil de la Photographie. www.cyjostudio.com (link to cyjostudio.com) @cyjostudio
