![]() ![]() (He is Tragedy the other sculpture is Comedy.) The paintings, which represent Davis’s first foray into the medium, have been dirtied with sand and patched to make them look weary, as if they have lived a life on the road. One of the busts-based on her father, the famous Broadway performer Ben Vereen-is captured with his mouth agape, as if he has been frozen mid-scream. The central figure, based on a cast of Davis’s own body, stands on a plinth with a gift in her hands and more than a dozen knives in her back. The display might feel gimmicky if there weren’t so much pathos in it. The Los Angeles-based artist, who also has a number of works on view this week at the Rubell Museum, created three sculptures of circus performers against a suite of paintings designed to recall a big-top tent. That’s why Karon Davis’s installation in the Positions section (which is dedicated to solo presentations by young galleries) feels particularly apt. Photo courtesy of the artist and the gallery.Īrt-world denizens often joke that art fairs are like a traveling circus-the same people in the same tent plopping down in city after city. Karon Davis, Tragedy at Wilding Cran’s booth at Art Basel Miami Beach. The installation is on offer for between $250,000 and $300,000. ![]() Hopefully, her memorable showing at the fair will change that. While the artist is gaining recognition in her adopted home country of Canada, where she has lived since the 1960s (her work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada and the Art Gallery of Ontario), she remains lesser-known in the U.S. There is a kind of alchemy in the simple materials-cloth, lightbulbs-that turns down the volume outside the booth and encourages you to actually look.īefore its debut in Survey (Art Basel’s section for historical solo projects), Harlem Quilt had only been shown once before, during Clark’s residency exhibition 24 years ago at the Studio Museum. The result is an installation that doubles as a deconstructed quilt and an intimate portrait of a neighborhood. Using the same kind of transfer process one might use to personalize a t-shirt, she printed the images on scraps of fabric she collected from Goodwill. “She imagined that someone in the images may have owned the clothes she printed them on,” said the gallery’s director, Madeleine Taurins. In 1997, during a residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the artist June Clark took her camera out onto the streets and photographed residents as they napped on the subway, waited at a crosswalk, and crowded around shop windows. June Clark’s Harlem Quilt (1997) at Daniel Faria’s booth at Art Basel Miami Beach 2021. If you plan to tackle the fair this weekend, I hope they bring a bit of sharpshooter energy to your visit. Over the course of six and a half hours, I hit up the fair’s four main sections-Galleries, Nova, Positions, and Survey-and chose one can’t-miss booth from each (plus one extra from the galleries section, which is by far the largest). ![]() Tasked with finding the best booths at this year’s Art Basel Miami Beach, a fair with no fewer than 253 participating galleries, I realized none of these approaches was going to work. They usually devolve into a go-with-the-flow-er on the way out the door. This individual begins with a plan to proceed aisle by aisle, booth by booth, only to burn out about a third of the way through. (This person has probably reached inbox zero.) Finally, you have the optimist. Then, there’s the sharpshooter: someone who steps onto the floor with a marked-up map of booths to hit in a highly optimized order. (You might find that the Venn Diagram between go-with-the-flow fairgoers and people with more than 1,000 unread emails in their inbox is a circle.) First, you have the go-with-the-flow-er-the person who enters an art fair with no specific itinerary and wanders the aisles to see what moves them. ![]()
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