Art Fairs
The55Project Art Foundation will present tree Brazilian Visual Artists at Untitled Art Fair, ‘NEST’ sector, during Miami Art week 2023.
The nonprofit will present a self-taught indigenous visual artist Miguel Penha Chiquitano for the first time in the USA, and the artists Laura Gorski and Efe Godoy.The Booth welcomes hybridity and encounters of lives that combine the body, its double and the wild lives that sustain them.
The assembly of o cio da terra / ócio da terra [estrus of the earth / idleness of the earth], made with a set of works by Efe Godoy, Laura Gorski and Miguel Penha Chiquitano, welcomes hybridity and encounters of lives that combine the body, its double and the wild lives that sustain them.
Laura Gorski's body-earth makes the density of the material that defines the shapes of her works coexist with subtleties applied to the extremities of lives in gestation. In direct reference to what the artist-mother experienced while generating life in her womb, the encounters between body-earth and plants applied in the work allude to how nature manifests itself in cycles of fertility and pause. With movements intertwined in double figures, each work bears witness to the being-in-the-world of bodies aware of their expansion and dissolution.
While the ground and the materiality of the earth define the figures in Gorski's works, the fluidity with which Efe Godoy promotes the encounter of plural lives chooses water as the guiding element of colors that give life to fabulous beings. "I'm still surprised by what I say to the many I am," writes the artist in her book, Being Hybrid, appearing hybrid when she considers maintaining the "wild will" as access to the infinite. Understood as "transformed nature", the artist's identity, the beings, and fables that populate her practice, are daily rituals in favor of the emancipation of imaginary worlds.
Efe Godoy
Talk with curator Auttriana Ward and Rafael RG, 2023
We are thrilled to announce our next artist to attend the Solo Project 2022. Rafael RG will be in Miami from November until Miami Art Week. I hope you see you around.
Rafael RG (1986) Lives and works between Guarulhos and São Luís do Maranhão. He holds a degree in Visual Arts from Belas Artes de São Paulo. (PROUNI Scholarship - 2010).
He received, among other awards, the 1st Foco ArtRio Award, the Honor Award for Art and Heritage Merit/IPHAN, Centro cultural São Paulo Acquisition Award, Iberê Camargo Scholarship for residency at Künstlerhaus Bremen (Germany), Pampulha Scholarship for Residency at Arte da Pampulha (MG). Among his current residences, Gasworks in London (2018), Black Rock Senegal in Dakar (2019), Triangle France - Asterides in Marseile (2020), YBYTU (2021), and FAAP Artist Residency (2022), both in São Paulo.
In his artistic practice, RG usually brings two sources to constructing his works: one documentary and the other affective. Generally, through the use of documents mined in institutional or personal archives associated with narratives that may involve his person or an alter ego. The interaction between these territoriality results in works that almost always come close to fiction or a tense notion of fictionality.
#The55project
Supported in partnership with @garciafamilyfoundation
Forbidden Bird by Regina Parra – 2021
in collaboration with Untitled Art Fair
“To be strong is to first live according to your weakness”—David Lapoujade
“Forbidden bird” is an installation by artist Regina Parra that comprises two neon pieces. In one of the pieces, the public read “NO SE”. In the other one, we read “VOLAR”. Both pieces are made of neon red lights mounted on a metal sculpture.
Since both pieces are installed on the beach sand, the public can glimpse both the sky and the sea through the hollow space of the neon letters. A poetic dialogue is then established: between the desire to fly—announced by the words in red neon —and the infinite blue of the sky and ocean.
For this project, the language chosen is neither the American English—spoken in the United States—nor the Portuguese—the mother tongue of the artist who now lives in New York. The Spanish language was elected not only to promote a more direct dialogue with the Latin community in Miami, but also because it is understood as a place of encounter. Standing for this place “in-between”—so familiar to the foreigners living in a new country, therefore, living “in- between-languages”, “in-between-cultures”.
The title “Forbidden bird/Pássaro Proibido” is a reference to Maria Bethania’s 1976 album of the same name. During the 1970s, Brazil was under a harsh military dictatorship. And the idea of a bird represented the desired freedom.
“Forbidden bird/Pássaro Proibido”, talks about desire, freedom, and, at the same time, the impossibility of this desire in the face of reality. I don’t know how to fly. I want to fly.
The impossibility here is not a renunciation, but a movement towards action and decision. It is not from today that artists try to touch the impossible, in a double role of drowning and survivor.
Desiring the impossible can also be the ultimate — and almost desperate — attempt to expand the living reality. An attempt to create spaces, folds, and cracks when faced to an unbearable situation.
