New World School of the Arts: Select BFA Graduate Show
“The Moon is a ball of left-over debris from a cosmic collision that took place more than four billion years ago. A Mars-sized asteroid—one of the countless planetesimals that were frantically churning our solar system into existence—hit the infant Earth, bequeathing it a very large natural satellite.” -Seth Shostak
MIAMI, FL—Mindy Solomon Gallery presents A Mass on Foreign Ground, an exhibition of six recent New World School of the Arts graduates curated by Miami-based artist and gallery owner Eddie Negron. Mindy Solomon Gallery is located at 8397 NE 2nd Avenue, Miami, in Little River. An opening reception with the artists will take place Saturday, August 20th, from 7-9pm. The exhibition will remain on view through September 3rd.
A Mass on Foreign Ground refers to our sense of otherness in a constantly changing world fraught with political strife and emotional turmoil. While the constant flow of time occurs, we navigate through life encompassing our own physical mass. Each artists’ thoughts and gestures create a sense of permanence in this evolving reality, a marker of sorts that simply states: I am here.
In this exhibition featuring Ani Gonzalez, Joshua Veasey, Elizabeth Newberry, Richard Sanchez, German Caceres, and Jessica Martin, these former students begin their transition from pupil to professional artist, manifesting the accumulation of their educational training and intellectual thought into material possibilities worthy of contemplation and critical review.
Ani Gonzalez says of her work: “Skewing photographs alters the format of its own dimension. The bending of flat shapes, the tilting of flat shapes, the stretching, projecting, and so forth are useful approaches to neglecting a flat angle view of images and pattern. The purpose is to take the language of rhythm and movement, and steer it toward a disobedience of dimension. I perceptually model figures in a passage of time. Subjects of interest include: visual triggers like moire, apophenia, schematic diagrams; transmittable sensibilities in daily life; and mental progression, such as the behaviors in schizophrenia.”
Joshua Veasey, through a dialogue between medium and object, seeks to understand both the tangible and immaterial, evoking the natural, within and with the man-made. His sculptures function as props, reality in replicas, staged in an attempt to relive the firsthand experience of an encounter, a place, and a time. Personal photographic references are reinterpreted to produce models, maquettes, miniatures, or relics of fleeting intimacy. These objects are extractions of memories, reassembled to create plastic versions of themselves; byproducts of geographical, social, and cultural language.
Elizabeth Newberry currently works with themes of reality, and relationship to everyday objects. She describes her process: “by depicting typical domestic objects juxtaposed within natural environments, the work explores how action becomes ritual and dictates relations between people and environments. This specific body of work alludes to tableau vivant, meaning living picture. It also draws visual reference from dioramas in museums and impressionist landscape painting. I am interested in an atmosphere that conveys the bizarre within the mundane.”
Working through various mediums, Richard Sanchez utilizes a process of systemization and chance—in some cases to mitigate mistakes, and in others to invite the unexpected as a way of creating abstraction. Through composition, moments of control rely on calculated predictions that rarely unfold as expected, accepting error as a ripe process for investigation. By exploring the gaps that chance can provide, his works offer lessons for the shifts between intuition and regiment, system and chance.
Merging states of dimensionality and flatness, Jessica Martin’s paintings convey both layering and compression of time, with a notation of movement. Drawn from recognizable imagery in a combination of figures and landscapes, they become disorienting and unrecognizable from their source. Built up through layers of paint and overlaid with mark-making, the paintings become highly worked, creating new narratives of their source of imagery. Shifting between swiftness and bursting, softness and aggression, frenetic mark-making becomes a gesture of visual tempo that phases and echoes rhythmic compositions.
A multidisciplinary artist, German Caceres (Richard Spit ) produces personalized ideas of culture, resulting in stern, humorous, and mixed manifestations. Image and sculpture combine to attempt inner-communication rooted in spirituality, tendency, and radiation. Through examination of belief, identity, direction, history, and solidarity, Caceres aims to digest our current place in time with works that seek to become effigies of human belief and social practice.
About the Artists
Ani Gonzalez is a second-generation American of Cuban-Mexican descent. Gonzalez studied at Miami Dade College and New World School of the Arts—where she earned her BFA and showed a consistent curiosity of light installations in the studio, that later fed her writing, projection work, and sculpture, as well as the drawings and paintings that led to pieces for this exhibition.
Joshua Veasey is a Miami-based multimedia, sculpture, and installation artist, as well as a recent graduate of the New World School of the Arts baccalaureate sculpture program. His work has been exhibited throughout Florida, and appears in several permanent collections including The Congressional Gallery in Washington, DC.
Elizabeth Newberry was born and raised in Miami, Florida, where she studied photography at New World School of the Arts and received her BFA. Newberry has participated in a number of group shows in Miami, Louisiana, and Key West and is currently participating at an artist in residency at Maggie Knox (Little Haiti, Miami). She works predominantly in photography, includes sculptural elements throughout the process.
Richard Sanchez lives and works in Hialeah, Florida. A graduate of New World School of the Arts, he works in painting, printmaking, and sculpture and has exhibited work throughout the Miami area, including the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation.
Jessica Martin is a Cuban artist, born in 1993, and based in Miami, Florida. She graduated from New World School of the Arts with a BFA in painting, participated in recent exhibitions including Intersectionality at the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, URGENT at Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, and Primitive Hut at Versace Versace Versace.
German Caceres (Richard Spit) is a multidisciplinary artist working in painting, sculpture, and photography. A recent BFA graduate of New World School of the Arts, Chilean-American Caceres is currently working and residing in Kendall, Florida. He is a Midnight Thrift member; works have been shown at Versace Versace Versace and Central Fine galleries in Miami.
