Interview

Miami-based collage artist, Jon Davis, presents his most recent body of work as an homage to the city he calls home. Throughout “Brokedown Palace” images capturing ‘moments’ of Miami are fractured, stratified, and presented through a renewed understanding of not only the space they represent, but as they currently exist within each seamless rendering. After undergoing a year-long distillation period, this most recent body of work can be expressed as the culmination of Davis’s practice over the past 30 years.

In previous iterations of his work, Davis has used found photographs to curate narratives that express the nuanced, often untranslatable, realities that exist within the human experience. In this tangential vein of new work, “Brokedown Palace” brings this concept closer to come featuring photographs taken by the artist throughout the tropical metropolis, placed in conversation with imagery pertinent to the larger story of Art History, and translated through Davis’s conceptually based process.

Davis’s work is comprised of synthesized realities, dissolving the gap between past and present. He merges each selected image to question a conventional understanding of reality while simultaneously highlighting their similarities. He flattens the chronological distance between each facet within each collage as they are flush, mounted on canvas or wood. Davis’s work shows that regardless of the technological changes that develop with the passing of time, the symbiotic relationship between art and life never ceases.

Through the duration of his artistic career, Davis’s self-taught practice creates his distinctly unique visual language, pulling inspiration from the philosophical, and ensuing formal, evolution of the arts in the late twentieth century. Davis’s work can be understood as a personal rendition of ready-mades, as he transforms present happenings provided by his surroundings through each synthesized reality contained within panes of glass. In this, Davis uses skills of everyday life to reflect a higher creative culture.

He is currently reading Once Upon a Time in Hollywood by Quentin Tarrantino.

Gabriel de la Mora, born in 1968 in Mexico City where he currently lives and works, is best known for constructing visual works from found, discarded, and obsolete objects. In an obsessive process of collecting and fragmenting materials – eggshells, shoe soles, speaker screens, feathers – the Mexican artist creates seemingly minimal and often monochrome-looking surfaces that belie great technical complexity, conceptual rigor, and embedded information.

De la Mora has exhibited at the Drawing Center, New York, and the Museo Amparo, Puebla, Mexico. His work is part of collections including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; El Museo del Barrio, New York; Colección Jumex, Mexico City; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and Pérez Art Museum Miami.

Luisa Rabbia (b. 1970, Turin, Italy) blends the distinctions made between the human and the natural, expressing solidarity with the cosmos through the organic, bodily landscapes of her expansive paintings. The scale of Rabbia’s paintings suits the themes she explores, oftentimes depicting overlapping abstracted figures joining and breaking apart, seemingly overcoming their physicality. She alludes to interconnected natural processes forming a thread between microcosms and macrocosms and interweaving them in a nebulous primordial state. Continually in flux and transforming, her forms created in expressive hues also evoke spiritual transitions. Upon closer viewing and bringing this substantial work to a more intimate level, her physical and intuitive process becomes visible with its rhythmically scraped paint, the stratification of pencil marks, and imprints of fingertips. Rabbia alludes to the minute traces that each person leaves over the course of a lifetime, yet simultaneously asserts an expansive and interconnected vision of a wider universe.

Luisa Rabbia lives and works in Brooklyn, NY and is represented in NY by Peter Blum Gallery. She received her MFA from the Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti in Turin, Italy. Solo museum exhibitions include: Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy; Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, MA; Fundación PROA, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice, Italy; Fondazione Merz, Turin, Italy. Group exhibitions include: Magazzino Italian Art Foundation, Cold Spring, NY; Manifesta 12, Palazzo Drago, Palermo, Italy; Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, Italy; Biennale del Disegno, Museo della Citta, Rimini, Italy; Lismore Castle, Waterford, Ireland; Shirley Fiterman Art Center, New York, NY; Maison Particulière, Brussels, Belgium; Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; Museo del Novecento, Milan, Italy; MAXXI Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI secolo, Rome, Italy; Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai, China. Rabbia was a Visiting Professor in Drawing at Harvard University, Cambridge, in 2013/2014. She received the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2022 and NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship in Painting in 2007.

The Currency Project is a conceptual art piece that explores value creation and value transfer.

Created and implemented by Abdul Mazid and Julian Lombardi in March 2020, The Currency Project seeks to use social engagement as a platform to explore contemporary theories surrounding currency, value and markets. By using tradeable sports cards as the basis for the project, Mazid and Lombardi are able to engage an economy and marketplace that already exists while exploring spaces surrounding art and the creative process.

The social practice element of the piece elicits engagement from the public through multiple platforms, social media, and through transactions. Ultimately, the project seeks to understand concepts surrounding currency as a form of transactional storage of value.

Elaine A. King was born in Oak, Park, Illinois and grew up in the Chicago area.  She was a Professor, at Carnegie Mellon University teaching the History of Art/Theory/Museum Studies.  King received an interdisciplinary Ph.D. from Northwestern University in 1986 from the School of Speech (Theory and Culture) and History of Art. Dr. King holds a joint Masters Degree in Art History and Public Policy, from Northern Illinois University and her B.A. was awarded from Northern Illinois University in Art History and American History [Pre-Law]. In 2002 she received a Certificate of Fine Arts and Decorative Arts Appraisal New York University.  In May 2011 she was invited to become a member of the National Press Club in Washington, DC.

She is a freelance critic who frequently writes for Sculpture, ARTES, Grapheion and sometimes for Pittsburgh Post Gazette, and the Washington Post.

Dr. King served as the Executive Director and Curator of the Carnegie Mellon Art Gallery [1985-1991, and was the Executive Director and Chief Curator of the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, [1993-1995] following the Robert Mapplethorpe debacle. Throughout her career as a curator she organized over forty-five art exhibitions, including a wide range of one-person exhibitions and catalogues for artists, Barry Le Va, Martin Puryear, Tishan Hsu, Gordan Matta-Clark, Elizabeth Murray, Mel Bochner, Nancy Spero, Robert Wilson, David Humphrey, and Martha Rosler. In addition, she has curated a wide range of group exhibitions including Light Into Art: Photography to Virtual Reality, New Generations, New York, Chicago, The Figure As Fiction, Abstraction Today, Drawing in the Eighties, and Art In the Age of Information. In February 2007 she was the guest curator for the Maria Mater O’Neill mid-career survey exhibition for the Museo of Art Puerto Rico, San Juan that opened in February 2007 and compiled a catalogue titled Artist Interrupted, 1986-2006.  In the fall of 2009 she was a guest curator at the Mattress Factory, in Pittsburgh for the exhibition titled Likeness: Transformation of Portrayal After Warhol’s Legacy. King has been the guest curator several times for the Hungarian Graphic Arts Biennial in Gyór between 1993-2005. The International Studies Art Program American University’s selected her to be the distinguished Art Historian/Critic in-residence to teach in Corciano, Italy, in the fall 2006.  Additionally Elaine King and Kim Levin were asked to nominate artists for the Venice Biennale.

She has been awarded numerous grants from diverse agencies including: United States Office of Information –Curatorial Grant for the American Section of the Master of Graphic Arts Biennial, Györ Hungary [shipping] Pennsylvania Arts Council Grant, Art Criticism Fellowship, The Trust for Mutual Understanding, Rockefeller Foundation, (research in Slovakia) The National Endowment for the Arts (In 1989,1988,1985, 1983) Museum s/catalogues, Hillman Foundation, Warhol Foundation, Richard K. Mellon Foundation Grant, French International Fund from Artists’ Action, for the Michel Gerard exhibit, American Association of Museums, Award of Merit for the Tishan Hsu catalogue Award of Distinction, American Association of Museums for the Mel Bochner catalogue. She was awarded an IREX grant to do research in Prague on changes in contemporary art after the fall of the wall. King was part of a panel discussion on Censorship and the Culture Wars at the Ann Arbor Film Festival and a reviewer for Bullfrog Films.

In September 2006, Allworth Press published the anthology titled Ethics and the Visual Arts that she and Gail Levin co-edited. Elaine King. In 2001 she was awarded a Senior Research Fellowship by the Smithsonian Institution’s American Art Museum to research contemporary portraiture.  Also King was awarded a Short-term Research Fellow in 2003 from the Smithsonian Institution National Portrait Gallery as well as a Short-term Fellowship at the Smithsonian Archives of American Art.

Elaine King spends her free time reading, gardening, sailing, cooking, visiting with friends, walking and traveling.  She is an avid fan of mystery novels and likes Sherlock Holmes—a topic she shared with Barry Le Va.

Currently Elaine King is working on an anthology of her writings that will be divided into four sections— Interviews, Talks, Review and Papers.  Hopefully within 1.5 years this volume will be published.