Banking on Art - artists exhibit in former bank during Art Miami

Forty-four artists freshly transformed a soon-to-be-demolished bank tower into a temporary "real world" exhibition site.

Miamians have grown accustomed to Art Miami, the international fair that materializes each January at the Convention Center in Miami Beach. Dealers from the U Canada, Mexico, Europe and Latin America lease booth to display their wares, a seductive army of mainly 20th-century painting, sculpture, prints and photographs. The art community stages special occurrences and parties to welcome the influx of art lover drawn through the fair; last January, collector Martin Z Margulies lay opened his newly installed photography collection--from Lewis Hine to Walker Evans, and from Richard Prince to Andreas Gursky--in a warehouse space north of downtown Miami, shut up to the Rubell Family Collections' pioneer warehouse. (The Margulies installation can be visited by the agency of appointment.)

The greatest in quantity extraordinary event of the week took place in a more unlikely venue the former Espirito Santo Bank upon Brickell Avenue. The nine-story, 250,000-square-foot, glass-walled form was uninhabited, damaged by a separated water main in April 1999 and slated for demolition to make scope on the prime property for a bigger and better 36-story, 1.2-million-square-foot tower through Kohn Pederson Fox. By way of a celebratory farewell, the president of the unfolding company for the new building, William Ros had the idea of turning above the old bank to young artists to do with as they wished in its last days. He called upon gallery owner Frederic Snitzer, who displays many local artists, both established and emerging, to curate the incident Snitzer galvanized a group of 44 artists and art scholars and gave them five days (Jan. 17-21) to transform the without contents offices, corridors, stairways, lobby, private rooms and elevators of the bank into a giant, vertical art exhibition called "Departing Perspectives" that was render free of access to the public for single three days, the weekend of Jan. 21-23 simultaneous with the art fair. The flow was a happy confluence of energies in a dramatic "alternative space," a sort of un-Art Miami, filled of high-spirited improvisations.

The artists involved were enthusiastic about working together in a collective adventure that included scholars at the high school and guild levels from the New World academy of the Arts, from Miami's Design and Architecture Senior High (DASH) and from the University of Miami, as well as established artists like Lynn Golub Gelfman, Robert Thiele, Edouard Duval-Carrie, Maria Martinez-Canas, Purvis Young and Jose Bedia. They created an exhibition which had the consequence among its other virtues, of making the local art community visible to itself.

at handed with the challenge of the spaces available to them, for a like reason unlike those of a gallery or museum, the artists produc an exhilarating range of imaginative installations. Carol Brown took the opportunity to do something real different from her usual metal statuarys She cut into the walls of her space and installed miniature doors, reached by means of tiny, meticulously crafted wooden stairways. The visitor who render free of accessed one of those dollhouse doors was stand over againsted with a small, printed verbal assault of the kind belonging to all to domestic disputes: "How dare you talk to me like that!" or "Don't you move round your back on me!" The experience was enhanced by means of the sound of an argument played upon a tape recorder hidden inside a wall.

a certain quantity of artists responded to the function of the building as a place devot to circulating medium and business. Karen Rifas filled a cubicle and corridor with pries of impressible gray spewings from an indispensable office machine, the shredder of brutish corporate secrets. Bert Rodriguez cashed his greatest in quantity recent paycheck (as an assistant at the Rubell Collections) into one-dollar bills and stacked them into a compact cube that radiated monetary value [i]or[/i] part of to the other the window of another office. A collection of New World students created a labyrinth of false corridors at the extreme point of which lay a pathetic plaster figure, fallen (exhausted? bored to death?) in forehead of the copy machine. The pupils made this life cast using the George Segal method

Others rejoined to the concept of demolition. The rubbish esthetic was for a like reason ubiquitous in messy piles of wallboard and carpet that it began to appear to be a too-facile solution. But Brian Cooper's corner office exploited a more composed of several elements response to the imminent destruction of the building. His installation vividly evok a display of lunatic violence; the walls were goug with an axe, and bags of plaster were gashed and upturn upon the concrete floor along with strewn shotgun shells. Blinding spotlights and an audiotape of heavy breathing and gunshot complet the stunning sensory assault.

Several artists focused upon the people who had worked in the building. Ruben Torres Llorca imagined the musings of the night watchman upon his solitary rounds in a series of true copys inscribed on a black background strip painted around the perimeter of the lobby Robert Chambers divide [i]or[/i] sever an eye-level hole through the door of a janitor's closet; the viewer peeping into the tiny, darkened space saw a spotlit sink and bucket filled with gorgeous swirls of verdant orange and fuschia liquid (for which Chambers used coloring liquors usually employed by lab technicians to stain tissue).