DOPPELGÄNGER PROJECTS PRESENTS: INVOCATIONS

Satellite Miami Art Fair
The Parisian Hotel
1510 Collins Ave
Miami Beach, FL 33139

December 1 - December 4, 2016

Featured Artists: Janine Biunno, Ida Gavois, Alison Nguyen, Laura Splan, and Cave Collective

An inherent essence of the human race is its capability to communicate and create new methods for translating ideas and experiences. In turn, as a species, our communication patterns evolve and develop. We are now host to over 6000 spoken languages and numerous written forms. With the onset of coding, SMS, emoji, gifs, and stickers in the digital age, we have now constructed an era of Neo-Hieroglyphics.

Invocations delves into the deconstruction of forms and movement to cultivate new meaning and space. Does the refinement of geometric systems forge a different kind of understanding? Does the formulation of contemporary rituals, binding technology and basic primal urges, summon new dialects to comprehend?

In Laura Splan's “Embodied Objects” series, bodily movements are copied and coded into a new configurations.  Using electromyography (EMG), she produces both cylindrical tops and textiles. Splan proves the body is, in fact, a mass of data, spewing its energy into translation through dancing, smiling, waving, squinting. She literally weaves the concept of artifacts, both digital and tangible, into what was once considered a domestic craft. A laugh is transcribed into rotating sculptures or a swirled textile of many colors. Hanging vertically on a second wall with the Manifest tops installed above, we needn’t see a blink in action to know it happened - it’s written on a tapestry.

Janine Biunno distills the classic structures that define human engineering genius into a pattern of repetitious shapes. Her ode to Sol Lewitt in the “Deconstructed Cube” wall mural distills the geometric forms down to their basic essence, creating a new system of transcription. In juxtaposition with her “Pyramids (triptych)" from her Future Systems paper cut-out series, based on over 100 google image searches of the Pyramids of Giza, architectural feats and symbols are easily associated with extraterrestrial subterfuge. These are the hieroglyphical standard that symbols are reduced to - flattened, yet layered with meaning.

Alison Nguyen, in collaboration with Alex Wolkowicz of Cave Collective, focuses on the ritual aspects of isolation, and the visceral energy of creation in “The Dispersal” and “White on White." The graphic display of objects and their organic assimilation into the natural environment in “The Dispersal” prophesies the visceral cycle of life, becoming reliquaries stuffed with meaning and the essence of life-source, harbingers of the eventual desiccation of all form. Meanwhile, “White on White” lands on the other extreme. Clean, flat, and light the esoteric spirit from within is on display, diffused into the atmosphere.

Ida Gavois builds on the layered contexts behind meditative acts. Her sound installation, “Beat,” exposes the relationship of heart and breath, the mainstays of life function that echo themselves until the dark takes over. Their dualistic rhythm brings on a higher awareness of our creation and purpose, while Cave Collective’s compilation, “Initiation” plays throughout the space, offering a dissonant meditative soundscape to reflect on the presented works.

Invocations brings greater awareness to the shadow side of these above constructs. Our constant need to evolve and change requires not only mutability, but the capability to base new variations on the building blocks of history, to create a new universal latticework. By refining everything to its essential being, do we all become the same black mass as the stars? We conclude these new languages and rituals bring us back to an existence on a heavenly circuit.