From Art Basel Miami With Love

First Person Artist is a weekly column by artist Kimberly Brooks in which she provides commentary on the creative process and showcases artists' work from around the world.

Right now, there is a giant pulsing orb of a fair going on known as Miami Basel singeing most artists' arm hairs. For those of you who haven't heard of it, it was started only five years ago as a sister fair to Art Basel Switzerland and has since mushroomed into an extravaganza with over 20 satellite fairs and numerous insane parties and festivities to go along with it. I'm not there, but some of my paintings are, and I have no arm hairs left to speak of.

A Sculpture by Uri Nir who has a film at the Pulse Fair in Miami. ABS and Stainless steel.
Image Courtesy of Braverman Art Projects.

During the life of this column I've been asked how I select artists to interview. I'm not an art critic and I don't view that as my role. Rather, I'm an artist sitting on a hill with a megaphone. Sometimes, as an artist/creative spirit/thinker, I have something to say--the editors here tell me they wish I had more things to say-- but most of the time I hand it to another artist. Artists, in my opinion, should be interviewed more about their own work. And it should be everywhere not just the art magazines. Since at any given time there are only, say, a couple gazillion artists with a show to promote, I pass the megaphone around. (The contradictory nature of making art and promoting oneself is a whole other subject.) So, in addition to being a part of the art community and frequent midnight art expeditions on the web looking at other artists' work, I also ask every artist I interview to suggest artists that they think should be featured.

One of our recent featured artists who is at the fairs is painter Liat Yossifor. She turned me onto some artists that I wanted to share with you:

Roni Horn at Miami Basel Fair

Roni Horn. Cabinet Of 2001 36 C-prints. Image Courtesy of Hauser Wirth .

Roni Horn. Puff (1) 2002 C-Prints / cymbolic light jet. Image Courtesy of Hauser Wirth.

Uri Nir at the Pulse Fair
I heard about this from other artist friends, too. He had a dark room with three projections that looked like film noir, all black and white; one video was of an injection of blood to a jellyfish-- it was very abstract, like an underwater flower, something between extreme beauty and pain.

Stills from the Installation at the Pulse Fair. Uri Nir Image Courtesy of Braverman Art Projects

Keren Cytter at Pulse
These are film stills from a film about relationships and gender-- a modern update of a Greek drama with a European twist. It does not suffer the fate of some art films which look like it should be done better and on TV. It actually works as a complex and visually layered works of art.

Keren Cytter, French Film, 2002 12' digital video, color-b/w
Image Courtesy of Noga Gallery, Israel.

Bari Ziperstein at the Pulse Fair
He makes sculptures that look like modern furniture with an artists' intervention.

Bari Ziperstein. Untitled (Chandelier). 2007 Chandelier, plaster over foamcore. Studio Installation View

Bari Ziperstein. Untitled (Bathroom) 2006 Light jet print (edition of 5) 30 in. x 40 in.
Images Courtesy of Bank Art Gallery.

Liat Yossifor herself exhibited at Pulse
Liat turns the surface of the paint into fine sculpture and light on it subtly changes was you change the viewing angle.

Liat Yossifor 15 x 18 in. Oil on Panel.

Liat Yossifor Installation paintings Oil on Panel. Images Courtesy of Noga Gallery, Israel.

Laurent Grasso from Nada Fair
Video that was digitally manipulated entitled "Palaiv". In lieu of that image which we don't have we show an installation of his creating sun in the night.

Du Soleil dans la Nuit 2006 Vue de l'installation Nuit Blanche
Image Courtesy of Galerie Chez Valentin

Kimberly Brooks at Aqua
This is what happened to the canvas I wrote about in my column about the creative process. My gallery saw it half-complete and insisted I finish so they could take it with them-- it was still wet when it left the studio.

Kimberly Brooks "No 7" 32 x 46 in. Oil on Linen.

Kimberly Brooks "No 7" 32 x 46 in. Oil on Linen. Detail.
Image Courtesy Taylor De Cordoba

Ara Peterson at the Nada Fair
She makes paintings that seem like sculputre and are based on music. She also experiments with retinal mixing where her use of color mixes in the eye and changes depending upon the viewers angle of viewing.

Ara Peterson. Impervious Vibes, 2006. Latex and acrylic on pine slats 60 x 85 1/2 x 1 1/2 inches

Ara Peterson. Impervious Vibes (details), 2006. Latex and acrylic on pine slats.
Image Courtesy Ratio3 Gallery.

If you're at the fair, please turn us onto some of the artists or observations that struck you in the comments section of the post.

Comments

[caril]

Thanks for the ABM report, as well as some of the satellite venues!

I've been admiring your posts for awhile, and wanted to comment earlier, but for some reason I couldn't log in then.

I'm a sculptor and painter living in Santa Fe and just about to launch into video arts, so I'm looking forward to checking out your website related to media arts...

also went back and read the post on the Creative Process... it's great and am sending it on to several friends... love the finished painting... tres cool!

Am excited about your repoting on arts in HuffPo... we need much more arts coverage in non-art venues...

[gouge]

Well Kimberly, as Art Basil Miami is happening, I am getting emails from my friend Tony Fitzpatrick from the 9th ward in New Orleans.......what, has happened to the art world? -where we have second rate hacks like Karen Kilimnick for instance, on the cover of Art In America -selling god awful oil paintings -to people who know zero about painting -like the designer Marc Jacobs for unbelievable amounts of money (she's the 'hot' commodity of the moment -for nothing at sharkforum.org we did a comparative photo essay between Kilimnick and Kinkade -Kinkade prevailed...btw did you note the embarrassingly insipid photo essay in W's 'art issue' of Mr Jacobs -instructive to say the least....

How did we get from the integrity of de Kooning, or Joan Mitchell to the over-heated, decadent banality, art as hedge fund window dressing we are now witnessing at such obscene spectacles as Miami at the moment- while we as a people plunge to ever new lows in terms of the society we are...we all fail, never has art been so far removed from what Ibsen termed 'an enemy of the people' -no doubt for their own good as a bulwark against decadence. I view Art Basil Miami as a colossal failure, of aesthetics, responsibility, skill, knowledge and as a society, nerve.