Press Release | Juxtapoz Clubhouse Miami
FIRST AMENDMENT GALLERY
JUXTAPOZ CLUBHOUSE
Press Release: First Amendment Gallery is excited to announce that it will be participating in this years Juxtapoz Clubhouse in Downtown Miami this December 6 to the 10, 2017. Find us on the third floor where we will be exhibiting paintings, sculptures, murals and installations by artists Andrew Antonaccio, Ellen Rutt, Francesco Lo Castro, Hell’O Collective, Hoxxoh, Lena Gustafson, Mando Marie, and Scott Albrecht. To receive a sneak peek at the works in the exhibition before the collectors preview is sent out this coming Monday contact info@firstamendmentgallery.com. The Clubhouse is located at 200 E Flagler St. Miami, FL 33131.
Clubhouse hours are:
December 6th - 6pm-10pm. December 7-10th, 10am-8pm.
Andrew Antonaccio
Andrew Antonaccio has become a strong force for urban art in Miami, most known for his black and white linear portraits and colored geometric abstractions created as part of artist duo, 2Alas. Now, Antonaccio presents his personal studio work that focuses on the juxtaposition of traditional aesthetics and the digital medium. He combines archived images with new era or modern photography, creating abstract compositions. Some of his work even factors in an interactive element, in which capturing his pieces digitally will present an alternate appearance on the viewer’s camera. He utilizes this unique characteristic as a commentary on the overwhelming digital experience of our current generation.
Ellen Rutt
Detroit-based artist, Ellen Rutt, makes bold, mixed-media paintings, installations, murals and wearables. Through the interaction of shapes, colors, and textures she tells a symbolic narrative of connectivity and dissonance - questioning the ways we create meaning from nonsense. Her work often has an immersive, performative quality, encouraging the participation of both the artist and audience in the documentation of the piece. Murals act as backdrops, clothing becomes costume, and shape cut outs become prop pieces in an equally playful and dramatic reflection of human life.
Francesco Lo Castro
Biography - Francesco Lo Castro (b. 1976, Catania, Italy) is an artist and independent curator whose complex painting process creates intricately layered works that appear machine-made; his visual style borrows from 1980s retro-futurist design and computer graphics. His work has been exhibited at HistoryMiami Museum, and Art and Culture Center, Hollywood, FL, among many others. Lo Castro is the founder of creative services agency Pop Art Studios, and the co-founder of the 2008 VANGUARD Art Fair, which merged with AQUA Art Fair the year after, establishing the first expo of its kind to emphasize emerging trends in contemporary art. In 2006, he curated the Art Basel week exhibition at the Art Center / South Florida, Miami Beach. Lo Castro’s work has been exhibited internationally and featured in numerous publications. He is listed among the creatives that helped forge the South Florida art community in the definitive books ‘Miami Contemporary Artists,’ released by Schiffer Publishing in 2007, and ‘100+ Degrees In The Shade: A Survey of South Florida Art,’ released by [NAME] publications in 2015. He currently lives and works in Miami, FL.
Artist Statement
My work employs unorthodox painting techniques that involve the intricate layering of pigment and resin to achieve a heightened sense of dimension and depth. What at first glance appears to be the result of countless hours spent with graphic design software is revealed at closer examination to be meticulously handcrafted combinations of acrylic, spray paint, epoxy and even gold leaf applied on wood. Colorful compositions depict a kaleidoscopic vision, dense with movement and a combination of explosiveness and strict order, vibrancy and dreaminess, power and release. Feeling frenetic and alive, these bright and shifting allegorical constructs present fleeting moments of harmony and dissonance as an immersive experience and a visual vocabulary that addresses social order within cosmic chaos, mutation within natural sequence. Depicting space on macro and micro levels, reminiscent of man’s interplay with the artificial and the organic, energy and landscape are examined in less obvious, oftentimes absurd ways. By establishing a link between physical reality and its hidden structures of ubiquitous networks, I hope to address questions that define humanity’s expanding vernacular in the face of accelerating existential progression.
Hell'O Collective
Hell’O is an artistic duo composed of Jerôme Meynen and Antoine Detaille. They quickly left behind graffiti letters and spray paint in favor of paper, characters, ink drawings and paint, moving on to sculpture, installations and wall drawing. They developed a unique graphic vocabulary that is complex and ambiguous, which they continue to expand in the course of their creative output, customizing many recurrent elements, which they combine each time with new characters, or incorporate into unusual settings.
Through their creative approach, characterized by its extreme conventional freedom, as well as its rigorous execution, they produce a fertile, imaginary fantasy world, sometimes grotesque yet always poetic. A kind of strange fantastic bestiary, populated with enigmatic animals and vaguely human-looking, asexual creatures, with shapes and symbols drawn from the iconography of fairy tales, fables, and other medieval allegories, ancient and contemporary mythologies, but also vanities, esotericism and surrealism. Death, hope, failure, optimism, frivolity, animalism, cruelty, constraint and the desire to control are the most frequently addressed themes in the works of Hell’O.
Using brief narrative sequences, which are sometimes juxtaposed, and a healthy dose of humor and mockery, they rail against human foibles in compositions that combine metaphysical reflection and pure non sense, showcasing mystery and the free interpretation of the viewer. The art of Hell’O lies in the image of the name the duo has chosen for itself: both joyful and macabre, amusing and frightening, cutesy and brooding, morbid and seductive, absurd and meaningful...Oxymoron and dichotomy are key areas of their work, playing on duality, ambiguity and pretense, continually oscillating between attraction and repulsion and dissolving into chaos that is paradoxically highly structured.
Hoxxoh
Douglas Hoekzema (aka Hoxxoh) began as a graffiti and street artist in Miami. Originally part of the MSG graffiti crew, Hoxxoh developed his own style that has evolved into an artistic practice that now adorns commissioned walls all over the city. He has mastered multidimensional abstract pieces that combine geometric and linear forms with an organic aesthetic. His new work for this show highlights his technique and mode of creation, investigating an intuitive manipulation of paint on canvas. The compositions are made with a variety of techniques, including a paint pendulum and a method involving the pouring of paint from one flat surface to another. The patterns he creates are moments of controlled chaos, the representation of the mechanisms of time and gravity through pigment. Much of his work is determined by chance and the passing of time, manifested in logarithmic spirals and hypnotizing striations of color.
Lena Gustafson
Artist Statement / Bio - Lena's recent work uses bright colors and large female figures at the center of each image. She uses repeated visual symbolism such as flags, water, plant life, color, and repeated gestures to communicate different stories within the body. Often times the line that separates the figure from her environment are blurred.
Traditionally the female form has been used as a symbol to indulge others' fantasies, dreams, and fascinations. Lena is interested not in what can be projected onto it, but instead what lies to be awoken within the body itself. She is interested in the idea of body memory and aims to visualize what this would look like if we could see it. Rather than the figure itself it is the stored information within the figure as well as its surroundings that interests Lena. By engaging with the history of representation of the female form, Lena contemplates new narratives for which the female body can understand itself.
Mando Marie
Mando Marie is an American artist and painter living in Amsterdam, Netherlands. She uses nostalgia as a tool to engage an audience. The work has a remarkable ability to give nearly any viewer the ‘I know that from somewhere’ feeling, regardless of age or background. Mando’s work subtly straddles a line between comforting and spooky. Often compared to Golden Book era illustrators like Eloise Wilken, and fine art outsider Henry Darger, her use of children at the threshold of adulthood relays both innocence and impending change. Mando uses stencils to create her signature twin imagery. As stencilism has grown in importance in contemporary art, primarily through the popularity of artists like Shepard Fairey and Banksy, Mando’s work is set apart by her vast visual library of hand drawn imagery, and her painterly attention to the work. Unlike other artist using stencils as an artistic tool, Mando’s work goes well beyond the overtly sexual, easily political or punchline imagery of most of her Street Art peers. Instagram @seeyouthroughit
Scott Albrecht
Bio - Scott Albrecht was born in 1983 in New Brunswick, NJ, and raised in Bethlehem Township, NJ. In 2003, he received a degree in Graphic Design from The Art Institute of Philadelphia. Scott is currently based in Brooklyn, NY and a member of The Gowanus Studio Space. His work incorporates elements of woodworking, hand-drawn typography, geometric collage using vintage printed ephemera and found objects and has been published and exhibited both domestically and internationally.
Artist Statement - The work I create is inspired by the day-to-day that happens around me — from the undeniably larger events, down to the smaller ones that we regularly interact with but almost always ignore. I draw inspiration from these moments, and use my work as a way to highlight these experiences and through the process, reflect on what they have to offer. Because of this, I often see my process and final works as though I’m creating reminders or artifacts for myself of these ideas and situations, and have come to use this perspective as a guide in my work — to create something worth being reminded of.