Harumi Abe is intrigued with the family photo albums that wind up at thrift shops and flea markets, and wonders how they arrived there. Perhaps someone died and left behind no living relative. Maybe a person went through an ugly divorce and ditched the albums to make a clean break with his past. Abe, a 28-year-old painter from Hollywood, says her mother-in-law owns a collection of photo albums she found at places such as the Swap Shop. While visiting her last year, Abe began paging through them. “I thought it was interesting how some people get rid of every single memory of their whole family history,” she says.
One album in particular captured her interest. “I guess these people just bought this house and they were so happy with the house they took a picture of every corner of it,” she explains. “They also had a few traveling pictures, personal pictures, all this different stuff that they do. One thing that interested me was that this family had only a husband and wife and a bunch of animals. Basically, me and my husband live in a very similar way.”
Abe, who moved from Japan to South Florida nine years ago, used those photos as the basis for a series of paintings she titled Resurrection. “I wanted to give them new life,” she says of the photos that were taken in the 1960s.
The paintings, which depict scenes she imagined unfolding inside the yellow house with jalousie windows, became her thesis exhibition at Florida International University. But Abe (pictured here) wanted to further explore the people she imagined living in the house. So she began working on a second, darker series that depicts ghostly figures in dimly lit rooms.
Three of those paintings will be on display at Time + Temp: Surveying the Shifting Climate of Painting in South Florida, which will open Friday at the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood. Curator Jane Hart says the show will feature 50 artists, some of whom are not primarily painters but incorporate the medium into their work in a way that twists the very definition of painting.
Miami artist Nicolas Lobo, for example, used glue and ground cereal to paint the 6-foot-by-6-foot mural “Cereal Pyramid” on one of the center’s interior walls. Lobo used a grinder to crush Froot Loops and Trix and then blew the cereal onto the mural, which depicts the silhouette of a pyramid. Food is not a new medium for Lobo, who has incorporated popcorn, imitation eggs and fake soy sauce into his sculptures and multimedia installations. “I’m interested in different types of food forgery and food engineering and the idea of food science and different structures that food has to inhabit,” he says.
Michael Genovese is another artist who takes a nontraditional approach to painting. He encourages viewers to mark up his painted aluminum panels with nails, bottle caps and other implements he hangs beside them. In one piece, “Secrets and Confessions,” viewers at a Chicago art center scratched into the painting unsigned messages such as “I’ve been fucked up and high for the past two months.” Genovese says he arrived at this technique almost by accident. Prior to making interactive pieces, he used a similar process to create exquisite engravings. “My gallery had been asking me to pump more of these out, like ‘How far can you take these and can you give me 10 to 12?’ I mean, they’re all hand-scribed and very difficult to do.”
He began to feel like a factory, and then last year, while completing a residency at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, he was busily engraving in preparation for a show when a woman approached him and asked if she could try it. Genovese reluctantly agreed. “This is a really protective process,” he explains. “The material is very expensive and very unforgiving. … So I let the lady go at it. She liked it and I’m like, ‘OK, now I gotta fix this’ or whatever.’ It just kept happening, and it started to feel better, like maybe I shouldn’t feel so protective about this process.”
The pieces, he says, document a moment in time and place, and Genovese hopes to display the results of this ongoing multicity project in a larger exhibition in 2012. Meanwhile, one of his pieces from Chicago will be on display at Time + Temp, as will another panel designed to capture new engravings. “I’m collecting thoughts and perspectives of the people of South Florida to add to the collection,” he says.
Farley Aguilar, a 32-year-old from Miami, is also working on a large-scale project. “Spell,” his oil-on-linen painting of witches and howling wolves in the woods during a full moon, is part of a series titled Ulf.
A Norse term for wolf and a common male name in Germany and Scandinavia, Ulf is based on a wolf-man who Aguilar notes is created in a witches’ cauldron and leads people into committing disturbing acts before he is finally destroyed by his followers. “Basically, I’m interested in how society and the individual manipulate one another, and how people depend on the supernatural to feel control over fate,” Aguilar explains. “How fate and society relate, in terms of the mysteriousness and inevitability of death, really interests me.”
Hart says the Miami-based artists the TM Sisters introduced her to the self-taught Aguilar’s work. “He has a gift for painting that is compelling, combined with his interest in cinema and literature, which informs his work in myriad fascinating ways,” she says. “I was struck by his obvious natural talent and offered to include him in some shows here, including his upcoming solo show.” Aguilar’s debut solo exhibition won’t open until March, but “Spell,” one of the major paintings in the series, will serve as a preview at Time + Temp.
Hart had planned to include about 25 artists for Time + Temp. She witnessed such a groundswell of interest in the subject matter and enthusiasm on the part of artists, some of whom are making pieces especially for this show, that twice that many people were invited to participate.
“I’m really excited about the way artists are stepping up and embracing the show,” she says. “I think it will be a great way for people to come and see a single show where they can get an idea of a wonderful cross-section of artists that are doing engaging work in what could be thought of as a very traditional medium, but that in this instance will be pushed and expanded in all kinds of different ways.”
Time + Temp: Surveying the Shifting Climate of Painting in South Florida will open 6-9 p.m. Friday and run through Jan. 10 at the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood, 1650 Harrison St. Call 954-921-3274 or visit Artandculturecenter.org.
Explore the accompanying photogallery to preview the show.
