Multi-culture clash
Paradise City offers a mixed bag of works from Miami
Paradise can seem like an especially deceptive notion for the people who dwell inside of it. Maids who dust luxury hotels and artists who labor in the shadow of great wealth can attest to that.
So any notion of heaven-on-earth in the Saltworks show Paradise City, which features Miami-based artists who toil in that landscape of sunshine, palm trees and economic and generational disparities, is surely an ironic one.
The artists in Paradise City evoke a city of contrasts, where the veneer of Disney World and well-financed retirement dreams rub up against life’s grittier day-to-day business.
Miami’s multi-culti urban reality is conveyed in Luis Gispert’s boom box sculpture “Da New Hotness,” which riffs on the city’s centrality for Latino and black subcultures defined by music. Gispert has essentially taken the “guts” of the pulsating, thudding car stereo and externalized them. A tiny toy car sits on top of a boom box tuned to a hip-hop station and can be made to buck and boogie, its trunk and hood endlessly flapping, when the viewer activates a switch.
The piece is a fairly no-frills, throwaway gag compared to Gispert’s other work, “Can It Be That It Was All So Simple Then,” a far more complex, nasty video combining rap and ra-ra. A sexy cheerleader raps against a green backdrop, lip-synching to some particularly grotesque hip-hop lyrics, her body movements mimicking the animated, outsized gestures of rap. The piece indicates how completely the angriest musical riffs have sunk into suburban culture, with cheerleaders booty shaking on the gridiron to da beat. Gispert also makes a humorous parallel between the bad-ass posturing of gangsta rap and the equally intimidating übercool of the high school cheerleader in his juxtaposition of two uniquely American forms.
Such cultural clashes reoccur in Paradise, suggesting that the city is a parallel pleasure zone for heat-seeking retirees and immigrants, young and old, rich and poor who’ve made the city a hothouse mix.
Youth culture hallmarks of graffiti, hip-hop and saucy attitude abound next to a certain geriatric je ne sais quois. Mixing youthful irreverence and a kitschy approach to the golden years, Westen Charles’ “Retirement” is an arrangement of six bowling ball “cross-sections.” The interiors of the balls reveal the kind of lowbrow wood veneer that also decorates Moose lodges and rec rooms. Charles repeats the retro associations in two drawings — “Couch and coffin,” a living room decorated with a pine box, and “Paper eyes,” a Styrofoam mannequin head draped with a toupee and given psychedelic eyewear. The same garish, ’70s color scheme of “Laugh-In” post-psychedelia that decorates the Styrofoam head accompanies Gean Moreno’s paintings, where strips of shocking orange, blue, lime, pink and silver suggest a new generation using a purposefully out-of-date aesthetic for graphic effect.
Paradise gives a palpable sense of Miami’s embrace of the artificial in both Moreno’s paintings and in Martha Otero’s color photograph “Miami” of a manmade lagoon and faux paradise, which is closer to a fantasy of the city than a reality. John Espinosa’s video “Saving the World” continues the idea of a manufactured paradise as a man outfitted in “Spider-man” garb proves a more vivid presence in the Disney World theme park than the bland, bovine people in their bleached-out clothes and shellshocked expressions who barely acknowledge Spidey’s gallivanting presence.
It is no coincidence that so many of the titles of the pieces in Paradise either reference or mimic song lyrics. Music weighs heavy on the show’s mind, from its own title drawn from a Guns ‘N Roses song to William Cordova’s drawings. His arrangement of variously sized works comprised of scraps of paper and photographs that have been decorated and modified suggests the sampled bricolage of contemporary hip-hop. Within the beautifully detailed images of a stack of vinyl records or a woman’s discarded clothes, a dark, mournful track emerges of a lovers’ breakup documented in cast-off shoes and abandoned vibrators that haunt the picture plane like ghosts. Mysterious puddles of unidentified white fluid add a dank, sexual angst to give the scenes a wounded dimension that works well with their puny scale.
But despite some strong individual works, Paradise is a show that never really hangs together. It offers too little evidence of a group of artists similar enough to lump together. The missing component in the spotty Paradise is a sense of urgency or energy. The show also suffers from meager representations of individual artists’ works, especially true of a scant two photographs by Martha Otero, which leave her objectives vague. Other artists are simply overexposed. At the other extreme are Lou Anne Colodny’s photos and inkjet prints of a contorted woman’s face draped in plastic. Any point Colodny is making about women reduced to sex dolls is certainly overstated in the five unvaryingly similar works on display.