farside gallery | art@work

2011-01-07T13:34:00.000-08:00

Escape the Room

January 15- February 28, 2011

Bailey Bob Bailey

Karen Combs

Michael Genovese

Michelle Weinberg

Opening Reception Friday, January 14, 7-10pm

Escape the Room is a crossroads for production in interior decoration, site-specific art installation and multimedia gaming organized by artist Michelle Weinberg for the Farside Gallery, a Miami alternative space. A typical house located in a nondescript residential neighborhood in Miami, the Far Side is a setting for interacting with contemporary art beyond traditional museum and gallery spaces. It is located in a “bedroom community” rather than in a prominent cultural center. Four artists (Bailey Bob Bailey, MA, Karen Combs, IN/NY, Mike Genovese and Michelle Weinberg, Miami) will transform rooms of Far Side’s interior using wallpaper, furnishings and other domestic objects. Visitors will feel that they are intruding on inhabited rooms whose occupants are away. Arrangements in each room will dare guests to open a closet door, pull back curtains, look behind the easy chair, to discover everyday objects that provoke curiosity.

The rooms will emulate popular online and video games in which clickable icons move a player through the spaces - or levels. Using imagery from each artist’s room, a game designer will create an online play-able version of Escape the Room, extending the exhibition into an interactive multimedia format. Artist Bailey Bob Bailey configures found flotsam into sculptures and mock-modernist furniture. Karen Combs is a painter/designer who produces hand-printed sheets of hyper-animated wallpaper. Mike Genovese translates texts from street signs and the plethora of fine print that engulfs us into elegant litanies. Weinberg applies pattern and typography to architectural surfaces to de-stabilize. All four will penetrate the banal veneer of domesticity to discover the surprising, subversive, and esoteric possibilities within home decor.

Miami has been associated with rapid art world growth recently, however, the context for art continues to favor a static dealer/artist/collector model of commerce. Escape the Room will reward viewer/participants with a new model for consuming art - where they live and play.

Read Anne Tschida's review of Escape the Room on the KnightArts Blog.

Read Janet Batet's review of Escape the Room for El Nuevo Herald. (English translation included)

Pledge any amount at Kickstarter.com to help translate the exhibition Escape the Room into a playable online game. Art awards at many pledge levels!

2010-05-26T16:47:00.000-07:00

Farside Gallery

art@work

2009-09-18T09:28:00.000-07:00

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'EDGE HIVE'
September 23, 2010 | 7:00 pm
Robert McKnight

2009-05-31T01:00:00.000-07:00

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'EDGE HIVE'
August 31 – September 28, 2010
Robert McKnight

Farside Gallery is proud to announce a solo exhibition of Robert McKnight, one of South Florida’s preeminent sculptors and cultural figures. Titled Edge Hive and curated by poet and critic Ricardo Pau-Llosa, the exhibition consists of fourteen sculptures realized during the last two years. It focuses on McKnight’s innovative use of concrete and tile in conjunction with other media. McKnight also has an extensive body of work in other media, such as wood sculpture and environmental installations. His important artworks in public spaces throughout South Florida, as described in the artist’s bio, attached, have become signature images of the cultural identity of Miami.

In the catalogue text to this exhibition, curator Ricardo Pau-Llosa says:

"The sculptures of Robert McKnight. . . seem to grow from within, built up by an impersonal force into hulks and edges, appearing free from contrivance, style, and the rhetoric of expressivity. Of course, this is a masterfully crafted illusion. McKnight is a consummate artist who focuses on transcending the personal while affirming individuality, conjuring a style in sculptures that seem hewn by necessity rather than utterance. Their surfaces liven with ceramic tiles whose scales and edges transmit the infinite and the singular—a Fibonacci sequence of the oneiric imagination."

Pau-Llosa also affirms:

"Tonally, running through all of McKnight’s work is a grappling with time—the millennial processes by which nature’s forms are created contrasted with the mere breath-span of our condition. He entertains at once, in the hives of these edges and hand-petrified shadows, a harem of feelings, a mounding vibrant shrine that mates pleasure with the earth, tomb with eros, and presents us with the grimy concrete of our daily lives bejeweled by the hungriest lights."

Robert McKnight was born in Kingstree, SC in 1951 and moved to Miami with his family in 1953. From early childhood he has excelled in art. While attending Killian High School, he studied painting at The Miami Art Center located on Kendall Drive. McKnight went on to study fine arts at Syracuse University, receiving a BFA in Painting in 1974, and as part of his work at Syracuse studied sculpture in London at the Sir John Cass School of Art from 1971-72. Upon his return, he worked at Miami’s Metrozoo as an exhibit designer specializing in the design and construction of the artificial rock facades. Later he worked with Rock & Waterscape Systems of California at Disney World in Orlando and throughout the southeastern United States and the Caribbean. He has always been active in the fine arts, exhibiting extensively throughout South Florida and the southeastern states.

McKnight has realized various major public artworks in Miami: wood collage panels at the North County Health Center (for Metro-Dade Art in Public Spaces); mosaic murals at the Pinnacle Park Apartment Complex (City of Miami Art Advisory Board commission); an environmental work with waterfall, lake, rainforest, and stream, incorporating bird sanctuary and swimming pool for pre-school children, at St. Thomas the Apostle Catholic Church; a porcelain tile mosaic work at the Little Haiti Cultural Center; and a mosaic mural at the Palmetto Bay Library. His work has had numerous solo exhibitions and has participated in group exhibitions at the Lowe Art Museum (University of Miami), the Miami-Dade College North Campus Art Gallery, the Art Gallery at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Gallery Antigua, Amdalozi Gallery, Green Light Art Space, The Bakehouse Art Complex, Farside Gallery, among others.

As a member of The Miami Black Artist Workshop in the 1970’s and KUUMBA Artist Association, McKnight has worked to generate opportunities for greater professional visibility for African-American and African artist. Says McKnight, “My mission as an artist is to create works that are individual in style and content reflecting my heart and soul, stretching the poetic and artistic license in both material and content.” He has paid inspired and consistent tribute to his cultural heritage in his efforts on behalf of other artists, and he has added to that heritage through the power and originality of his art.

Edge Hive: The Sculptures of Robert McKnight
Ricardo Pau-Llosa

Of all the arts, sculpture truly is the one most indebted to Modernism. Unlike painting, sculpture had to revolutionize its techniques and not just its focus, themes, and imagery. For example, nothing in painting, not the bidimensionality of Cubism or the startling effects of collage, compares with the liberating and mind-expansive impact which assemblage had on sculpture, freeing it from the exclusivity of chisel and torch. Other liberations of media and method would follow, from the found-object precursor of Conceptualism to Earthworks. And sculpture has a distinct spatial extroversion, even aggressiveness, capable of rivaling or interrogating architecture or nature outdoors, while indoors it has the power to displace a gallery’s center of gravity away from the image-thronged walls simply by standing on its own and compelling orbits of contemplation. As Yeats’ dancer cannot be cleaved from the dance, sculpture, much more than painting, is radiantly one with its medium whose immediacy can never be eclipsed by subject or style. It is the body that denies shelter, the shelter that trumps the finality of flesh. In its ineluctable thingness, sculpture distinguishes itself from the dramaturgy of installations, even though many contemporaries confuse the passion for enduring form with the temporal nature of this splinter form of theater.

No such confusions reign in the distinctive sculptures of Robert McKnight. These works seem to grow from within, built up by an impersonal force into hulks and edges, appearing free from contrivance, style, and the rhetoric of expressivity. Of course, this is a masterfully crafted illusion. McKnight is a consummate artist who focuses on transcending the personal while affirming individuality, conjuring a style in sculptures that seem hewn by necessity rather than utterance. Their surfaces liven with ceramic tiles whose scales and edges transmit the infinite and the singular—a Fibonacci sequence of the oneiric imagination. The multicolored facets shield and bristle, swirl sensuously and resist pattern. The fossil has become a musical instrument; the ancestral effigy has used color to armor itself against erosion. Fracture has become caress; dolmen, mask, beast, and figure dialogue in a ceramic tongue. Found detritus—pipes, wires, glass—gather and dwell. The hive of the sculpture sustains this ecology of forms and surfaces, keys in a three-dimensional keyboard playing a tidal-pool melody that pipes down suddenly so we can hear the real dream playing.

McKnight’s work also plays on all the liberations of medium and form that made sculpture possible in the modern world. Molded concrete sets the hands of fire and clay upon a cold medium which is synonymous with urban ant-hill. The tile-covered surfaces, shoal-like in their shifts and shimmerings, strengthen the link to edifice while scoring affinities with and critical revisions of various landmark styles and images, high to low brow—from Mesoamerican jade masks to Antoni Gaudí, from Gustav Klimt to the Ishtar Gate to the Watts Towers, from Byzantium to the Mayfair in the Grove. In a kind of leap that only a genuine artist can make appear effortless, McKnight
intersects the full arc of the rhetoric of surface, binding and unbinding pleasure and decor, formalist acumen and refractory hedonism. The tiles calm and rise, edging in currents, a fractal sea of inlaid waves that captures the eye and leads it to its aesthetic destination.

It is particularly interesting to see McKnight’s tropological mind at work, especially in the manipulation of referential forms. These seem to grow out of the concept, self-sustained reefs surging into view out of the magma of creative insight. The process opens onto powerful diverse metaphors where simultaneous referents come forward without the hackneyed reduction of Modernism or the contrived accumulation of Postmodernism. The silhouette of the “Apostles” is not a boiled down form of the erect figure or icons but is an assertion of the columnar power and presence which a disciple is imbued with. Each “Apostle” culminates with rods shaped to evoke head and halo while also alluding to strength and the internalized rails on which any life consecrated to a vocation must move. The top-jagged “Effigies” likewise pick up metaphorically on the vertical flat surface of icons to evoke flame and shield, shrine and rampart. “Mankind” appears like a congealed cloud of smoke or cumulus, anviled into a crowning vessel, armored by color, caught in the moment of transformation toward something not yet discernible, a figure perhaps, a mushroom cloud, a three-dimensional shadow of an unconscious that is all too human. “Mockingbird,” the most representational of the pieces in the exhibition, alludes to the Harper Lee novel, but also engages the hiving of form and edges to create a dramatic portrait of a character.

The emotional timbre of the works is also remarkable, for tone does not surrender to formal invention or dazzling tile work. “Atomic Dog” is monumental, as indeed most of these pieces are, a statement that beckons, even within the ruins of ambition, for a complex understanding of the energizing beast that fueled ravenous, nurturing, warm-blooded life. On the other side are the feminine heads McKnight is known for, here represented by “Nubian Profile,” mellifluous in its allusions to landscape, a vertical island that will not give up the siren and the goddess that called it into being. Tonally, running through all of McKnight’s work is a grappling with time—the millennial processes by which nature’s forms are created contrasted with the mere breath-span of our condition. He entertains at once, in the hives of these edges and hand-petrified shadows, a harem of feelings, a mounding vibrant shrine that mates pleasure with the earth, tomb with eros, and presents us with the grimy concrete of our daily lives bejeweled by the hungriest lights.

Read more online:
Las esculturas de Robert McKnight: íconos mágicos envueltos en mosaico
By Carlos M. Luis en El Nuevo Herald.

Sculptor Robert McKnight's "Edge Hive" at Farside Gallery
By Swampdog at Miami New Times

2009-05-27T13:34:00.000-07:00

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Big Sky West (chester)
June 9 – August 29, 2010

Read More:
Farside: la casa del arte en la frontera del Oeste de Miami
Adriana Herrera at El Nuevo Herald

Del wild WEST al westCHESTER
Rafael Lopez Ramos at Los Lirios del Jardín

Works by Ahmed Gómez, Robert McKnight, Jorge Pantoja, Raúl Perdomo and Tracey Snelling.

Big Sky West (chester) explores the expansive sky of the American West as a determinant of freedom and opportunity; fraught with danger and risks, explorative voyages that are filled with adventures and hope for a better future. Strong cinematic content and play define this exhibit along with fantasy, science fiction, film noir, comics and the Westerns; the wild frontier and renegade spirit as part of the American dream and nightmare.

Go West 2004 mix media, 14 x 8 x 14".

In Go West, the words act as almost a foreboding premonition of danger if one doesn't hurry away from the site of the sculpture. The snowy scene with objects forever stuck in the frozen pond portray the opposite feeling of the West. The piece acts as almost a pulp fiction book cover or a film noir movie poster, capturing the title, dramatic scene and mood that these often contain.

Crossroads/Badlands 2006 mixed media, 24 x 24 x 20".

Crossroads/Badlands celebrates the idea of venturing out in the Southwest, and the landscape of the West. One side has a video that is about road trips; the other side hasvideo that explores Westerns and the lone cowboy. Both sides reference the solitary path that one takes when setting out for exploration. The billboards and titles represent bothbillboards alongside roads such as Route 66, and the 1950's and 60's kitsch that can be found at the roadside stops. – Tracey Snelling

Like A Real Rock 2009 Graphite, colored pencil, ink pastel and acrylic on paper, 11 x 14".

Robert Altman‟s Three Women (1977), having left indelible marks in Jorge Pantoja‟s memory, is the source of the piece titled Like a Real Rock. The artwork plays with the artificial and the real. It erases the line between the two. The piece fantastically embodies a wish for the real as essential, bordering on decorative elements and the desire for fantasy.

Carol Jazzar writes about the artist “Jorge Pantoja comments on cinematographic history and our faculty for impressions”; a freeze-framed image as a flash that acts as a key to emotions and imperfect, fractured actualities. By recalling the seminal movie, Three Women, Pantoja‟s work stands as a testament to both the longevity of good directorship and the fickle, impressionable nature of the mind.

“I use drawings as a means of holding onto a past that endlessly eludes me. This flow of images is not related to a physical space. It includes that special time, the insular space created by the memory of the films that I love.” – Jorge Pantoja.

Cowboy Smith 2006 Oil on linen, 26 x 50 inches.

The paintings Cowboy Smith, Cowboy and The Sniper are from a series with a strong reference to comics and the western culture.

“My objective is to have two elements of formally distinct nature coexist in a narrative environment. The cowboys trapped in a pictorial environment, loyal to their heroic duty but devoid of the literal meaning of the story, taking its place through icons or formal references to another „western‟ in its broadest sense, which design is culturally established; to illustrate a tautology without giving up the possibilities of painting: The Good, the Bad and the Painter” – Ahmed Gómez

Americana struck a chord with the leading round pieces of Bluebonnet when the curved blue pieces were placed back to back. Abstraction is more than just design and pleasing the eye. This „cutting edge‟ sculpture asks the artist to look at more than the merits of good design.

The Conestoga wagons, with the pioneer settler and his wife with the flowing hoopskirt capped with her bonnet tied tightly to her head, are central to American Western expansion and the pioneering spirit. The bonnet is as much a symbol to America as the Colt 45 or the Remington Rifle.

Bluebonnet 2010 mixed media, 28 x 16 x 12".

“In making this piece the intent was to create a dramatic design that stood on its own merit as a pleasing design and, secondly, to speak to some conviction, some statement that makes the collection of elements have a reason for working together. If the mind questions, then the eye can give it answers.” - Robert McKnight

Space Cowboy 2003 Oil on canvas, 79” x 60".

Raúl Perdomo‟s Space Cowboy is a seminal work to his current Multiverse Series. In 2002, NASA launched the space shuttle Columbia on a mission to service the Hubble Telescope. These astronauts, in that environment, were moving at tens of thousands of miles per hour, 360 miles in outer space! Here was the embodiment of humanity‟s drive for knowledge, temporarily sustained inside a life support system suit, which in turn was tethered to the shuttle by an umbilical. The juxtaposition between this „larger than life‟ action and the absolute fragility of these conditions was certainly moving.

“The real transformative component for me however, was that an unbroken chain of events had led us to this moment in this place to repair this instrument; a technology that promises to bring us closer to the origin of the universe. “ – Raúl Perdomo

2009-05-26T20:07:00.000-07:00

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1245 SW 87 Ave. (Golloway Rd.), Miami, FL, 33174.

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2009-05-26T20:05:00.000-07:00

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^exhibitions

2010 2009 2008 2007 2006 2005

may 7 throgh june 8, 2010.
william cordoba

2009-05-26T18:29:00.000-07:00

^home ^Farside Gallery

^general info

^admission
farside gallery is free and open to the public.

^contact
farsidegalleryartatwork@gmail.com
(305)264 31 20

^directions
1305 Golloway Rd. (87 Ave.), Miami, FL, 33174.

View Larger Map

^parking
free parking across the street at central Bible Asembly of God.

2009-05-26T17:20:00.001-07:00

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Farside Gallery | an alternative project of art@work
2010 2009 2008 2007

August 31 - September 28, 2010
EDGE HIVE
Robert McKnigth

June 9 - July 18, 2010
BIG COUNTRY BLUE
Ahmed Gómez, Robert McKnight, Jorge Pantoja,
Raúl Perdomo and Tracey Snelling.

May 6 - June 6, 2010
DECOY
Gean Moreno & Ernesto Oroza

2009-05-26T17:20:00.000-07:00

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art@work | as far as the grass roots

Pablo Cano

William Cordoba
may 6-june 6, 2010.

2009-05-03T13:01:00.000-07:00

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2010 2009 2008 2007

june 9-august 29, 2010.
Big Sky West(chester)
Participant artists: Ahmed Gómez, Robert McKnight, Jorge Pantoja, Raúl Perdomo and Tracey Snelling.

Big Sky West(chester) explores the expansive sky of the American West as a determinant of freedom and opportunity; fraught with danger and risks, explorative voyages that are filled with adventures and hope for a better future. Strong cinematic content and play define this exhibit along with fantasy, science fiction, film noir, comics and the Westerns; the wild frontier and renegade spirit as part of the American dream and nightmare.

In Go West, the words act as almost a foreboding premonition of danger if one doesn't hurry away from the site of the sculpture. The snowy scene with objects forever stuck in the frozen pond portray the opposite feeling of the West. The piece acts as almost a pulp fiction book cover or a film noir movie poster, capturing the title, dramatic scene and mood that these often contain.

Crossroads/Badlands celebrates the idea of venturing out in the Southwest, and the landscape of the West. One side has a video that is about road trips; the other side has video that explores Westerns and the lone cowboy. Both sides reference the solitary path that one takes when setting out for exploration. The billboards and titles represent both billboards alongside roads such as Route 66, and the 1950's and 60's kitsch that can be found at the roadside stops. – Tracey Snelling
Photograph courtesy of Carol Jazzar Contemporary Art Robert Altman‟s Three Women (1977), having left indelible marks in Jorge Pantoja‟s memory, is the source of the piece titled Like a Real Rock. The artwork plays with the artificial and the real. It erases the line between the two. The piece fantastically embodies a wish for the real as essential, bordering on decorative elements and the desire for fantasy.

Carol Jazzar writes about the artist “Jorge Pantoja comments on cinematographic history and our faculty for impressions”; a freeze-framed image as a flash that acts as a key to emotions and imperfect, fractured actualities. By recalling the seminal movie, Three Women, Pantoja‟s work stands as a testament to both the longevity of good directorship and the fickle, impressionable nature of the mind.

“I use drawings as a means of holding onto a past that endlessly eludes me. This flow of images is not related to a physical space. It includes that special time, the insular space created by the memory of the films that I love.” – Jorge Pantoja.

The paintings Cowboy Smith, Cowboy and The Sniper are from a series with a strong reference to comics and the western culture. “My objective is to have two elements of formally distinct nature coexist in a narrative environment. The cowboys trapped in a pictorial environment, loyal to their heroic duty but devoid of the literal meaning of the story, taking its place through icons or formal references to another „western‟ in its broadest sense, which design is culturally established; to illustrate a tautology without giving up the possibilities of painting: The Good, the Bad and the Painter” – Ahmed Gómez Americana struck a chord with the leading round pieces of Bluebonnet when the curved blue pieces were placed back to back. Abstraction is more than just design and pleasing the eye. This „cutting edge‟ sculpture asks the artist to look at more than the merits of good design.

The Conestoga wagons, with the pioneer settler and his wife with the flowing hoopskirt capped with her bonnet tied tightly to her head, are central to American Western expansion and the pioneering spirit. The bonnet is as much a symbol to America as the Colt 45 or the Remington Rifle.

“In making this piece the intent was to create a dramatic design that stood on its own merit as a pleasing design and, secondly, to speak to some conviction, some statement that makes the collection of elements have a reason for working together. If the mind questions, then the eye can give it answers.” - Robert McKnight
Raúl Perdomo‟s Space Cowboy is a seminal work to his current Multiverse Series. In 2002, NASA launched the space shuttle Columbia on a mission to service the Hubble Telescope. These astronauts, in that environment, were moving at tens of thousands of miles per hour, 360 miles in outer space! Here was the embodiment of humanity‟s drive for knowledge, temporarily sustained inside a life support system suit, which in turn was tethered to the shuttle by an umbilical. The juxtaposition between this „larger than life‟ action and the absolute fragility of these conditions was certainly moving.
“The real transformative component for me however, was that an unbroken chain of events had led us to this moment in this place to repair this instrument; a technology that promises to bring us closer to the origin of the universe. “ – Raúl Perdomo