David Nash Communes with Nature, by Robert Sparrow Jones, Michigan Quarterly Review, September, 2014

I discovered British sculptor, David Nash’s work as perhaps the artist would appreciate—while wading through a meadow of Queen Anne’s lace, salvia, and Rudbeckia. Along the quiet walkways at the Frederik Meijer Gardens, the Sculpture Park offers an impressive collection from well-known artists such as Rodin, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Claes Oldenberg, Louise Bourgeois, Kiki Smith, Roxy Paine, and many others. Off the walkway, weaving art and nature, a meandering meadow took me to an opening, valley-ed between a screen of deciduous trees. Here I found Nash’s, “Dome”, an intriguing clumping circle of 46 cast iron mounds that neatly brought to mind the spirited growth of fungi after a good rain. In the distance “Scarlatti” by Mark di Suvero teetered hulkingly, but there was something transfixing about Nash’s “Dome” that promised more to come.

David Nash, “Dome”. In the distance “Scarlatti” by Mark di Suvero
“David Nash: From Kew Gardens to Meijer Gardens”

“David Nash: From Kew Gardens to Meijer Gardens”, is an exhibition that embraces the integration of horticulture and sculpture, featuring more than 25 works indoor and outdoor. Any visitor is able to discover and question the works placed with whimsy among the palm trees and ferns of the Lena Meijer Tropical Conservatory, such as “Red Throne” and “Three Iron Humps”.  They could be found charismatically situated between cacti and succulents of the Arid Garden where I discovered “Apple Ladder”. However, it was inside the white walls of the Meijer gallery—well out of Mother Nature’s reach, where I really experienced David Nash’s work. Inside, the hushed gallery space offered an immediate spiritual clarity like a church. It was here, and not in the direct landscape that I understood Nash’s collaborative spirit with nature.

David Nash, “Cork Dome”
“David Nash: From Kew Gardens to Meijer Gardens”

Nash is an obvious sentient being. His childhood was spent in Wales, working with his father, clearing the fields, and replanting trees on family land. This offered valuable time discovering the properties of wood, which lead to a life-long interest. Nature provides a material for Nash, and a chance form. His language is wood—oak, elm, ash, lime, yew, redwood and mizunara. He speaks it very well. The life-force of the tree and it’s inherent properties; light, moisture, minerals, and gasses, are thoughtfully considered while approaching every sculpture. He shapes and gouges, using deep cuts as linear drawing by way of chainsaw. They are not fastidious. However, the most important methodology in his work is…letting go.

David Nash, Maquettes Display
“David Nash: From Kew Gardens to Meijer Gardens”

The limits and controls of his locally sourced wood keep Nash in a careful balance. Along with his authorial hand, his most enigmatic tool is the actual element of time. He prefers to work outside for practicality. He cuts away and shapes his work where the tree had fallen, right where the tree had grown. Being in the elemental forces of nature become part of each piece. But the timber is unseasoned and, therefore, full of moisture. And long after finishing, the wood continues to dry.  During this natural process there is so much tectonic shifting in the rough-hewn surfaces that it commands the aesthetic structure of the work. Without intervention, Nash’s sculptures warp and twist. Instead of an artist controlling the work, he is letting the work go. The cracks and fissures are nature’s finish.

David Nash, “Crack and Warp”, 2010 Lime wood
“David Nash: From Kew Gardens to Meijer Gardens”

“Crack and Warp”, is the perfect example. This tapered monolith exemplifies Nash’s meditation in form and composition taking cues from minimalism. Nash slices the long, flat sides in rough-cut horizontal lines. Up close the incisions are very expressive. A chainsaw would allow for this. Fast cuts gouge, slice off edges, and dissect the surface, digging and routing without fragility. Their spacing and depth are imperfect and vary slightly. In this case nature’s finish is an organic reaction to Nash’s geometric decisions. The result is a standing column that wavers and dances. Light passes through its wooden gills. The thinner the section, the more the materials warp. The more they crack, the more they brake off. Nash captures the vitality of living, the balance of nature, and the imperfection of human nature. It is exciting and unapologetic in its visual experience.

David Nash, Installation View with “Two Vessels” in foreground, “Cork Dome” in background
“David Nash: From Kew Gardens to Meijer Gardens”

Some of Nash’s works closely resemble the natural forms of the trees themselves, like “Cave” and “Red Frame”. Honoring the spirit of the material, Nash leaves the actual textures of the wood and rooting structures for all to see.  Here the artist is showing us time.  Cracks and warp certainly stand for this, but it is also literally in the growth rings of the tree. All details are displayed in a tender light beneath their tough corpulent shapes. These works are not at all sentimental.

David Nash, “Vessel Series”
“David Nash: From Kew Gardens to Meijer Gardens”

My favorites recall ethnographic objects. His, “Vessel Series” are mysterious, haunting monuments.  They can be seen here in an upright composition, showcasing Nash’s observational interest in the vertical growth of a tree.  Perhaps they are a meditation on connecting the earth and sky.  The series is also presented in the horizontal composition of “Two Vessels”. This pair of charred oak pieces affects me the most. Their long and low shapes are riveting, sluicing the gallery floor with a dark prowess. Their gesture takes me to the carved cedar canoes from the Salish tribes of the coastal northwest. Their dramatic profiles suggest these ominous shapes in the same way. And like many of Nash’s works, “Two Vessels,” has been charred, transforming the color and texture of wood to an intensely rich, carbon patina. Nash creates this blackening with a blowtorch. The blackening of the surfaces are not just a tone or a color, but a deeper dimension that appears bottomless. Burning the wood creates a surface that is honest, calling to mind the big subjects of life, love and death. The vessels appear to be cutting into an invisible surface, standing for the relationship between memory and the sensation of the passage of time.

David Nash, Installation View with “Two Vessels” in foreground, “Red Frame” in background
“David Nash: From Kew Gardens to Meijer Gardens”

I think that Nash has a generosity of spirit in sculpting that makes us want to share those profound experiences with nature. He is deeply connected to the environmental movement, with an awareness to look after our natural resources. When I was living in the Pacific Northwest, I was contracted to make a documentary concerning the rebirth of a very important indigenous tradition: the carved cedar canoe, dugout of a single cedar tree. In “Tribal Journeys: the Resurgence of the Canoe Nations” I had the opportunity to interview Suquamish elder Ed Carriere. As he was working a canoe in his outdoor studio he candidly expressed to me something I never forgot.  He said that the cedar canoe is more than just a utilitarian vessel.  It is a deeply respected spiritual object that begins its long life as a tree in the forest and continues in the prayer ceremonies as it is felled and then crafted into a dugout canoe. But the vessel is also a metaphor for the importance of community, the process necessitating hard harmonious work. I understood it as a living, spiritual object.

David Nash, Pyramid, Sphere, Cube, Incised, 2010
Partly charred cypress and charcoal on canvas
“David Nash: From Kew Gardens to Meijer Gardens”

Spending time with Nash’s work confirms that he is entrusted to nature. The relationship between the hand of nature and the hand of the artist is deep and communal. He earns the respect of the material and we trust his perception of nature, ancestry and sense of place. Nash’s aesthetics are born out of indigenous materials. Their physical presence matters, their materiality matters. Earth, air, fire, water, he follows the elements that demand boundless change and a haunting spirit.

http://www.michiganquarterlyreview.com/2014/09/david-nash-communes-with-nature-2/

Fearsome Beauty, The Art of Lauren Boilini, by Robert Sparrow Jones, Michigan Quarterly Review, August, 2014

Whenever I travel, especially to someplace new, the first thing I do is go on a run. For me running is the necessary immersion I need it in order to establish a sense of place, which in turn informs my work as a painter. At times it is also very useful to get me out of the work, a mental distraction to float outside the subject matter. There is a sweetness in the balance. This is why I found myself this past July as an artist in Residence for The Studios of Key West (TSKW), running along the southernmost coast in the Conch Republic with 95 degree weather and 80% humidity, thinking, looking, simmering.

Lauren Boilini, swims ocean side, due west, during The Swim Around Key West, 2014, a 12.5 mile endurance racePhoto Credit: Artistic Director, Erin Stover-Sickmen, The Studios of Key West who volunteered to kayak for Lauren during the race.

Within twenty-four hours of arriving at TSKW from Baltimore, MD, another resident artist, Lauren Boilini stepped into the 90 degree waters of the Atlantic for The Swim Around Key West, a 12.5 endurance swim following the shores of the island. From her unusual vantage, Boilini has a very different perspective of the island.

“I decided it would be a great way to understand the geography and life of the island, and it would be my first major warm water swim, as well as the longest distance I had covered,” she said. She added that she used her time training for the event contemplating work that she hoped to accomplish while in-residence. “Residencies are all about time and space to make work, so I thought an 8-hour swim would be a great way to start that time off.”

Though she is an avid swimmer, the ocean is sublime, is able to swallow her up in a moment. She explains it as a terrifying, but awesomely powerful experience. Partway through her grueling 12.5 mile Key West swim, she had spotted an ominous shape directly below her in the shallow water. It was surrounded, as Lauren described it, by what looked like a “sporadic fish orgy.” When she looked more intently she understood the shape to be a six-foot tiger shark. She kept on swimming.

Lauren BoilinSticky Fingers, (View #1), 2014
latex paint and chalk on wall, 12′ x 12′ x 12′
School 33 Art Center, Baltimore, MD

Lauren Boilini is a fearsome beauty with an obsessive drive, a good humor, and a superman tattoo to boot. Her work, in essence, is about the sublime. Her relation to water as a long distance swimmer is a pure physical experience. In previous races Boilini has swam with the jellyfish of Ocean City (she has been stung numerous times), completed a 10K in the Hudson River, the 4.4 mile, Chesapeake Bay Swim between the spans of the Bay Bridge, a 7.5 mile crossing of the Potomac river from the Virginia side to Maryland and a submersion into the crystal clear water off the coast of Cinque Terra, Italy. This direct experience manifests itself in her work in almost every way. She typically paints large-scale. A prevalent physicality is consistently contained in the expression of materials, primarily in oils. Recently she has been working directly on the wall, working under a specific time constraint like an endurance race, exploring painting in the expanded form. This is exemplified in her installation work, “Sticky Fingers,” presented at School 33 in Baltimore. Because the painting takes up four 12ft walls, the viewer actually enters the piece and is enveloped in it. “Sticky Fingers” engages the floor as well as the ceiling. Her abstracted figures team and swirl, controlled by solid blocks of organic background shapes of dark intense hunter green, cadmium red, and black. This not only frames the work, but also gives the larger wave-like forms a foreboding unease. Her use of softer organic background shapes in yellow, pink and peach then act to sink into the space and places the viewer inside the action of a heaving and plundering ocean of figures.

Lauren BoilinSticky Fingers, (View #2), 2014
latex paint and chalk on wall, 12′ x 12′ x 12′
School 33 Art Center, Baltimore, MD

“I like working large—larger than the scale of my body, and I love the potential for it to overwhelm the viewer. If I think about it, I enjoy the overwhelming scale of open-water swimming. I grew up in Indiana, which does not have many bodies of water other than a few small lakes, so I was always afraid of water so deep I could not touch the bottom and I was deathly afraid of fish. The first open water swim I attended terrified me, but I did not like that something scared me so much, so I signed up for my first race.”

Lauren BoilinLovin’s for Fools, 2013
oil on canvas, 87.5″ x 155.5″

I imagine that like running, a swimmer has to accept what is not under control. There are so many variables: weather, temperature, terrain but there are other factors such as salinity, flotsam and jetsam, and, to say the least, various impending creatures. As an athlete Boilini finds inspiration in physical action that indulges pleasure and pain and searches for the limit. I can really respond to this. As a long distance runner, I feel endurance in her paintings. It manifests in the use of operatic choreography. She engages a provocative vocabulary of bodies to populate her canvases in crushing and seemingly reckless dances. Her compositions utilize movement as vicious as the pushes and pulls of a riptide. Her painting, “Lovin’s for Fools”, is a terrific example of her choreographed theater, a large canvas of 87.5in x 155.5in, that appears to be a fistfight or a wrestling orgy. She is particularly committed virtuoso and yet her figures are rather showpieces of form and style and less about being convincingly portrayed. “Lovin’s for Fools” uses stacked figures as the make up of a lucid wrecking body of water. It splashes of bodies. We are not reading these activities as much as we are immersed in them. We experience their ebb and flow. Emotionally they advance and recede in fleshy warm tones and a pastel pallet designed to subvert their impulsive violence. This strategy renders painting like “Lovin’s for Fools”, sensual and tender and at the same time pungent. This works for other paintings such as, “Hurt So Good” where a stampede of stallions acting as a a crushing tidal wave soften in pallet and abstraction to subvert allusions of sexual desire and violence.

Lauren BoilinHurt So Good, 2013
oil on canvas, 84″ x 134″

“I love wrestling, and it is very choreographed. I love the practiced violence of it, as well as the real violence. Many of the works are meant to simulate the power of a crowd of figures. A mob is a terrifying and powerful beast, but it can be a sublime space for me. I also look at flash mobs- organized, choreographed chaos. The imagery I work with comes from wrestling, MMA fights, cultural and military gatherings, and other forms of conflict and competition. I am fascinated by the things that men do to each other, for sport or war.”

This all makes sense to me. Lauren began her athletic career immersed in teams sports, soccer and then rugby until she injured her back. Swimming for her was the only physical activity she was able to do. Her creative ambition mirrors this relationship. She longed for the contact of running, the impact of tackling, and the camaraderie of the group.

“I thought I was touching God the first time I tackled someone in a rugby practice. When I played rugby I loved being crushed into a scrum, pushed into the inside of a maul, piled into a ruck. I loved being a part of bodies on top of bodies, on top of bodies, and I think that has reflected in my work over the years. Open water swimming is all about vast, open space that surrounds you, and over time that has become a necessary contrast to the compression of space that I usually look for.”

Lauren Boilini, “In the CuOil, acrylic, aluminum and LED lights, 8’ x 76’, 2014
Maryland Department of Public Health”

Her most recent piece is her most ambitious. Her public commission for the Maryland Department of Public Health has just opened this past weekend. “In the Cut” is a large site-specific installation for their new laboratory in East Baltimore. For that project Boilini needed to work with a fabricator and lighting designer in the creation of am impressive 8ft x 76ft, larger than life painted light box. The composition for the work is taken from an abstracted panoramic landscape of Baltimore, mixed with imagery from the lab. Baltimore is like a large ominous body of water and a place where she swims regularly. It is a city in constant flux.

“I think what draws me to Baltimore is the rawness of it. For every beautifully built building, there are 10 dilapidated and derelict ones. Walking down the street you see an enormous amount of diversity: equal parts despair and destruction, equal parts joy and possibility. Nothing is easy there, but it makes you realize how much worse it could be. That is an interesting place to be a creative person.”

Lauren Boilini at the grand unveiling of her public work, “In the Cut”, commissioned by the Maryland Department of Public Health in East Baltimore.

On my first run in Key West I turned up the White Street Pier. I ran close to the edge so that I could look into the shallow, aqua green water, searching for stingrays and manatees. Two large brown pelicans pulled in sidelong to me and hovered eye-level. Their yellowish heads were pulled back at rest, seemed to be addressing me when suddenly they plunged head-first into the Atlantic. When a canvas plot of Boilini’s is stewing they are precisely and credibly described as notions lodged in her dancers psyches. Her most fascinating relationships swim around and funnel down into a target. Zeroed in here, a secret waits to astonish us, and I can envision Lauren in the swim, the ocean’s pull surrounding her.

http://www.michiganquarterlyreview.com/2014/08/fearsome-beauty-the-art-of-lauren-boilini/

Tim Powers: Below the Surface, by Robert Sparrow Jones: Michigan Quarterly Review, July, 2014

Michigan Artist, Tim Powers is an unabashed materialist whose work revels in minimalism, but he is not at all resistant to one metaphorical symbol, the pillow. In effect, “Tim Powers: Below the Surface” at the Grand Rapids Museum of Art, is a quiet meditation on the mundane and intimate space of sleep. His source of investigation is the philosophical and existential oppositions that manifest themselves in the industrial materials he uses. The theme of the unconscious is carried through in the ethereal hues inherent to polystyrene and latex that collectively invite the viewer into a meditative space. But what stirs this exhibit are the oppositions Powers designates in the details. They are full of physically engaging contradictions that lure you inside the work. And while dreams themselves remain nameless; a sustaining eternal question about what makes our own landscape lingers.















Powers grew up on the west side of Detroit until he was seven. He is the youngest of four. His father, Daniel Anthony Powers, a graduate of the University of Detroit was a mechanical engineer who designed and manufactured hardware. Along with acquiring several patents, Daniel became president of the thriving Precision Hardware, which manufactured panic and fire exit hardware for over half a century. Precision Hardware was situated along Fort Street near Del Ray, an area cut off from the rest of Detroit by a deeply industrial landscape: the River Rouge and Zug Island. Physically, the company was an amalgam of repurposed buildings they had purchased one after the other in a perfect row, including what was once the local meat market. Each building was referred to by its original owner’s name—Shimmle’s, Dewy’s—and each served a dedicated function of the company: a foundry, inventory, shipping warehouse, a churning machine shop. Tim would spend summers working in front of a drill press and a large bin of parts, manually clamping down and rote drilling. He ate his lunches on the asphalt as the air mixed with the toxins emitted from the Ford Rouge Complex and Wayne Soap—an industrial plant that rendered animal parts.

This geography is evident in “Below the Surface.” The menace of a deeply personal and historical landscape is sometimes right on the surface. There is nothing warm or billowy about these pillow forms. They are made from the cold, hard, and rubbery industrial materials that Powers experiments with. His pillow forms are molded from polystyrene, a material used for uniformity and mass production, into an illusion of softness by manipulating their shapes. Sometimes other materials are used, such as the polished concrete in, Untitled, 2011, concrete and the mix of latex in, Untitled, 2010, polystyrene, latex rubber. A few of pieces, with their insides emerging, are even more evocative.

Untitled, 2011, polystyrene, enameled wire, a white pillow form, is comprised of a bottom shell and top layer. The two forms have a silia-like membrane made up of enameled copper wire that peeks out around the seams between the two surfaces. Texture here suggests movement, magnified and slithering. One can imagine, just as sleep takes us, that the unconscious opens up to release memories. The invading detritus of the mundane becomes horrific. In another work, Untitled 2010, polystyrene, jacketed wire is a pillow form where the seams have opened on one side to reveal a gill-like texture. Because this hinted interior is made of white-coated enamel wire, the texture resembles sinew and offers a subtle, otherworldly breathing. It is inviting, sensual, and frightening.

Especially dramatic are the materials and effects of the pillow form, Untitled 2010, polystyrene, silicone caulk. Here the transparent plastic top layer reveals a spiny rolling landscape of white latex silicon spikes. Powers overtly seduces the viewer with the slickness and the association with the manufactured newness of the object. His contradictions are playful: hard and soft, light and dark. He then repels us with the reminder that here is a pillow. This is where we sleep when our childhood night terrors come back to us as dreams of water, submersion, and sci-fi horror.

Content is played the same way, pulling the seams open of cultural layers to infuse the medium with the realities of where we come from—through the lens of Powers’ own narrative:

“I have an awareness of the complex cooperative dynamics of a place. The factors that make up the unique characteristics of a particular place: the people, the climate, the industry, the culture and heritage, and the natural environment. These are in play in any “place” and are what becomes its personality. The more time there, the greater the awareness, if you are looking. Keen observation forms a connection that sits outside sentimentality. These observational details become the foundation of the emotional connection, the smell of a soap company or lacquer plant, the neon of a neighborhood bar, a draw bridge tower, the ever present litter that collects along a curb in a viaduct, cast iron street lamps, refinery tanks and two story clapboard homes separated by a potholed street.”

Is this personal landscape available to the viewer? I think so. Powers’ personal experience and relationship with his surrounding environment can not only be observed through the visible layers but also through his control and reconstructing of environment. Following the 1967 riots and the stabbing of a neighbor, the Powers family moved to rural Monore. Powers continued to be influenced by Detroit–his father commuted in daily to run Precision Hardware, and Tim worked there during summers and on Saturdays and later, as a part-time employee while he earned his undergraduate degree at the College of Creative Studies–but his work is shaped by the intersections between the rural Monroe and Detroit.

“In a way, the monumentality of Detroit taught me to look ‘up,’ and agrarian Monroe taught me to look ‘down.’ Both environments had a different, but equally wild nature. Each was full of texture, smells, subtle and dynamic colors and awesome vistas.”

“Below the Surface,” speaks to that experience of the diversity of place. I see a connection between identity and the industrial landscape. Powers evidences an unsentimental love for where he comes from rather than rebellion against it. This is where Powers is especially acute. By his devotion to a material and the development of a symbolic figure, he creates an atmosphere where a descent into the unconscious is a collective experience.

Untitled, 2013, polystyrene, provides a perfect example. A large grid of more than 400 somewhat organic white pillow forms takes up an entire wall and a corner of the exhibit. From a distance, the work appears minimal. They are stark white against the softer white of the actual wall. They resemble multiples, which would not be entirely off the mark. Every pillow form began when pulled from a wooden mold that Powers crafted. Then, however, he methodically made each one unique using a heat gun to create the curls, folds and wrinkles that stir the imagination. I like the contrast between appropriating a material used for uniformity and mass production–polystyrene is usually pulled around a mold tens of thousands of units over to create identical forms–and then tailoring the resulting forms.

Because Powers renders each pillow form distinctive, the near-repetition of the installation pieces does not create an impression of uniformity. Rather, it ignites a curiosity about each pillow’s personal identity. The illusion from a distance of movement encourages close examination, which results in deep struggle. You have to resist the temptation to run your fingers across the silky and satin surface of the folds. I imagine the downy insides, and the restlessness of each form takes us to an intimate, interior space: sleep, dreams and then excitement, passion, sleeplessness.

Albrecht Durer’s, pen and brown ink drawing, Six Studies of Pillows, 1493, comes to mind. Durer masterfully depicted folds and wrinkles to evidence the body, and he created adroit likenesses that keenly described life. Powers, however, purposely and less sharply, takes a three-dimensional form and creates a very different effect. Untitled, 2013, polystyrene evidences passive revelation of the act of sleep, lovemaking, violence, despair, and sleeplessness. Instead of rendering material into a representation of direct observation, Powers gives us something interior. The language of wrinkles is somewhat unclear. They are subtle in their shifts. As a symbol, they signify the interior, private experience. This telling mark points to the artist’s interest in materials. The movement and expression, unpredictable and somewhat orchestrated, awakens us to our collective folds of the unconscious.



A final note: before the entrance to the exhibit a molten metal artifact is displayed. It evokes a certain intimacy, resembling something animal, the residue of life lived. Powers notes that he wanted to include this piece because although he didn’t make it himself, it provides context for the items he did make. It is one of many artifacts collected from the floor of Precision Hardware by his late father.

“It broadens the definition of what is art and what constitutes a body of work. It is an item I had no control of its creation, yet supplements the discussion of those that I did. I think the interpretive nature of its form provides an access point for the viewer on a basic level, and also supports my relationship to the specific process I experienced with my new work. It went through a similarly transformative process the polystyrene went through, going from rigid, to pliable, to rigid again and changing form in each step. Like many materials it holds limitless potential forms that lie latent in its current form. It is a state that is only momentarily static. That moment ranging from minutes to eons, but it will change again. It was originally not my thought to realty this to the landscape, but it is certainly an obvious parallel.”

With “Below the Surface,” Tim Powers’ expert capabilities as a maker result in a deeply industrial landscape. Inherent to his materials are the playful subversions possible because of our associations with closeness and escape. We all harbor deep internal landscapes. They are expressed as an amalgam of memories, sweet and dark as entanglements of fossilized metal.

http://www.michiganquarterlyreview.com/2014/07/tim-powers-below-the-surface/

Six artists get chance to create in studios at the Deering Estate in Palmetto Bay (Miami Herald)

For about seven years, Mia Leonin had the idea to write a collection of poems about a little girl named Micaela growing up in a Spanish-speaking seaside town who uses her imagination to cope with a trauma.

But all this time her idea added up to miscellaneous thoughts on paper.

“It was just this raw kind of mess of language and images. I didn’t have a story,” said Leonin, a creative writing professor at the University of Miami and who writes freelance theater reviews for the Miami Herald. “I never even thought it would add up to anything.”

 

About a year ago Leonin earned a residency at the Deering Estate at Cutler in Palmetto Bay, part of the environmental, archeological and historical preserve’s Artist in Residence program.

What once was a “mess of language and images” became a manuscript of about 61 poems titled, The Fable of the Paddle Sack Child.

“Literally, sitting at this desk, little by little it turned into something,” said Leonin, 46, on a recent visit to her Deering Estate studio. She lives in Kendall.

The Artist in Residence at the Deering Estate is a program that gives literary artists, as well as visual and performing artists, an opportunity to use the 444-acre site to nurture their creativity. Deering created the program in 2006 as an extension of the art patronage of Charles Deering, who built the estate on Biscayne Bay at the beginning of the last century. By 1922 the Maine native had amassed an art collection appraised at $60 million and included works by El Greco and Rembrandt.

The unpaid residencies give artists a year to draw inspiration from the pastoral setting.

Artist Natalya Laskis plans to work on several 24-by 24-inch paintings for a body of work titled, Better Homes. Through the acrylic and oil paintings, Laskis will explore her idea of gender role reversal. 

“Instead of men, women are (financially) carrying the household and men are staying at home, taking care of the kids,” said Kendall resident Laskis, 34. “My work revolves around social and economic issues – on what’s happening right now.”

A short walk away from her studio, housed at the estate’s Carriage House, Robert Sparrow Jones is working on paintings inspired by growing up in rural Pennsylvania.

 

“When I started to walk around the Estate, I started feeling nostalgia and I thought I couldn’t be myself unless I went back to my childhood and put myself into that landscape,” said the 43-year old Wilton Manors resident.

A self-portrait in his studio depicts Jones holding deer antlers. “I don’t see any deer out here, but where I am from, they are pervasive,” he said.

Nearby, propped on an easel, is another canvas. It depicts two blond girls. One, clad in a bathing suit, is sitting on a wood folding chair and is holding a flowerpot. The other, with a skirt and a short top, is standing next to her. The colors in the piece are slightly more vibrant than in the selfportrait.

“In Florida, it is just always blooming and vibrant colors," Jones said. “In the Northeast, we sit and wait for the landscape to change and then it’s a wow factor.”

A few doors down from Jones’ studio, Lucinda Linderman’s fingers are coated with rust and oil. She is working on a mountain landscape created from old bike chains she collected from South Miami’s Mack Cycle and from dress hangers thrown away after weddings at the Estate.

“I work with reclaimed materials,” said Linderman, an environmental artist from South Miami. “I do a lot of dumpster diving so I was really happy when I realized I could professionally dumpster dive.” 

Environmental art involves reusing tossed-out materials to create a sculpture or wearable art, such as a dress Linderman made from a dark-green parachute. Linderman, 37, is part of the new Eco and Environmental Art Residency Program, which was funded by a National Endowment for the Arts matching grant the Estate received this year. During the one- to three-month residencies, up to six artists will explore environmental art under Linderman’s guidance.

“It allows artists to come in and explore in ways they may have not,” said Yantis, the exhibit specialist.

 

The Artist in Residence program also allows the public to see the working artists.

“This is not a private, hide-in-your-studio type of program,” said Kim Yantis, a exhibit specialist at the Estate. “They are encouraged to rather than just leave a piece of art work at the Estate, to create an activity or an action that really involves the public.”

Laskis is planning an outdoor watercolor workshop, while Jones is creating functional wood batroost sculptures. The roosts invite bats, whose numbers have recently declined due to a fungus, to feed on insects, many of which eat crops.

Linderman will continue an Eco-Art Outreach Program, in which high school students conceptualize, create and exhibit art made with reclaimed materials. In addition, she will teach workshops for Miami-Dade County teachers on how they can incorporate reclaimed materials in the classroom as well as host environmental art talks to the public.

Meanwhile, Leonin is continuing her residency for another year in hopes of finishing the two manuscripts she has been working on – and to start writing a third, which will incorporate the Estate’s environment into her poems.

“I’ve wanted to bring the Florida landscape into my work for a couple of years. Here, the naturalists will walk around with you and show you things,” said Leonin. “One of the nice things about the residency is that it allows you to be who you are. I just needed the solitude to finish these manuscripts.”

Lidia Dinkova, Miami Herald, Aug 2013