Monica Uszerowicz

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  picks May 23, 2023

  Alejandra Moros

  Under the small lens of a microscope, the largest human organ becomes vast and terraneous. The skin’s barely perceptible features become outsized: Wrinkles are mountainous, tiny puncture wounds look like caves, and flaky patches resemble the leaves of prehistoric flora. An unsuspecting viewer could be forgiven for assuming the palm of a hand or a section of cheek were landscapes.

  In Alejandra Moros’s oil paintings, that is exactly what happens. The artist often renders her subjects in such extreme close-up that their scale and contours become deliberately, surreally indeterminate: Are those

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  picks April 11, 2023

  “Give Them Their Flowers”

  “Give Them Their Flowers” is a group exhibition bookended by celebration and mourning: At the entrance to the show, synthetic blooms emerge from a wall and dangle from the ceiling, while toward the back, Loni Johnson’s meditative installation The Repast, 2023, features an altar with a statue of Yemaya, the Yoruba goddess of motherhood and the sea. On an adjacent wall are photographs of Black queer Miamians who’ve passed on. Alongside their pictures are empty frames—spaces for those whose stories were never told.

  The exhibition’s title is drawn from “Give Me My Flowers,” a 1965 ballad by the

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  picks March 09, 2023

  Dino Felipe

  In his 1977 Christmas Lectures at London’s Royal Institution, Carl Sagan described the possibility of communication with extraterrestrials, declaring, “One thing you’d have to do first is to be sure you can understand the message.” Dino Felipe, an iconic, prolific Miami musician and artist who, over the past twenty years, has produced hundreds of artworks and recorded more than one hundred albums—nearly all of which he made in his bedroom—has described his output as the product of channeling: That is, he is the recipient of special transmissions from various corners of the dream world and sundry

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  picks July 14, 2021

  Najja Moon

  “We all do what we can . . . what we can.” There’s a choir of voices emanating from Najja Moon’s sculpture Your Mommas Voice in the Back of Your Head, 2021, that offer lessons in cadence: specifically, what an intonation can do, and how one sparkling word can illuminate an entire sentence. The artist’s brilliant piece houses four audio channels in its glass casing, through which a quintet of mothers recite parables, affirmations, insults, and warnings—the manifold lexicons of love—in English, Spanish, and Haitian Creole, Miami-Dade County’s three most-spoken languages.

  The recently commissioned

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  picks April 06, 2020

  Lucia Hierro

  Walter Mercado, the cherished Puerto Rican astrologer, died last November; in January, Chinese media reported the first known death from COVID-19. The uncorrelated events seem to outline a cosmic ambigram: The loss of someone who was, for many, a divine comfort twists into the systemic upheaval of terrene life.

  Mercado appears alongside traditional holiday candies in Lucia Hierro’s Portate bien para que te dejen lo reye (all works 2020), a digital collage on suede depicting ephemera recognizable to Caribbean and Latino families, on view in the artist's exhibition “Vecinos / Neighbors.” Throughout,

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  print March 2020

  Cecilia Vicuña

  ON A SATURDAY MORNING this past December, Cecilia Vicuña bundled some fifty people into a living version of a quipu—a system of knots utilized by indigenous Andean communities for record keeping and communication. Vicuña and a group of assistants bent over the supine participants, who were swaddled in blue-green combed wool. The artist had written SEE/RISE on her and her assistants’ palms, and they turned these inscriptions toward each body in the human quipu as if cuing the participants to look and ascend. Throughout the morning, Vicuña quietly chanted, her voice like a lullaby. If we could

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  film January 21, 2020

  Perfect Storm

  FOR HOW MANY EONS have humans looked to the firmaments—for dreaming, for communion with the departed—while they were really looking within? A third of the way through Weathering with You (2019), a film of remarkable beauty by anime auteur Makoto Shinkai, we’re gliding through Tokyo’s Jingu Gaien Fireworks Festival, as each CGI explosion sprinkles twinkling lights like pixie dust over a lambent, lifelike Tokyo. The film’s two teenaged leads, runaway Hodaka (Kotaro Daigo) and orphan Hina (Nana Mori), are in love. “The way the sky looks can move you so much,” Hodaka says.

  The night is so clear

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  print November 2019

  Vaughn Spann

  Vaughn Spann’s “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep” is a two-part arrangement: two series and one suite of works are on view at David Castillo Gallery, and three pieces are installed at the Miami River Armory, an enormous former hangar. The artist’s first foray into sculpture produced hulking monuments; in such a large space, they look spare and purposeful. For the young painter, a Yale graduate who had once intended to study science, this is a good thing: Assemblages of his work have been mistaken, he has said, for group shows. He veers between dense abstraction and figuration—and these days between

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  picks July 22, 2019

  “[Unsubscribe]”

  “[Unsubscribe]” is framed as a show about artists who “engage questions of e-identity formation and social interactions that play out in our imaginations,” exploring the avatars we embody online and offline. It’d be shopworn territory if it weren’t a red herring. The exhibition, set up in a house gallery in Little Haiti, one of Miami’s most rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods, mines the internet not simply as a place where real and unreal blur but as a space populated with the same entrenched prejudices that fuel every other system.

  In his video TRAMA, 2018, which casts a literal and figurative

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  picks May 24, 2019

  Hiejin Yoo

  Falling in love, it’s said, slows time and clouds one’s better judgment. Details get hazy, except for the right ones—those become rose-colored. In Hiejin Yoo’s “The Recovery of Openness, Intimacy and Trust,” sunsets, lovers, and smooth-haired pets alike are imbued with the myopia of real devotion. The oil paintings look cropped, with some details removed to venerate other details. In Balmy As Spring Air, 2019, two long-armed torsos rub against each other, sharing a chair. In Any Ideas?, 2019, an orange-hued figure holds their own hand—perhaps for comfort. Yoo’s subjects are often postcard

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  picks March 29, 2019

  “Fragment”

  Is a ghost a disembodied entity? Or is it the palpable heaviness of a space in which time has elapsed, an energetic trace of what took place? The works in “Fragment” recall not the ephemerality of what’s lost but how it lingers.

  Some of the work is hardly visible and better sensed or glimpsed, like a clipped recollection. Jenny Brillhart’s life-size shelf scene, Contrapposto, 2019, is austere and muted; the painted and photographed items it holds are captured in contours, and are too abstract to name. Yanira Collado’s Untitled/echague, 2019, a pinewood structure filled with carbon paper and

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  picks February 21, 2019

  Kentaro Ikegami

  Light is a near-physical thing—a phenomenon, to be sure, but one that can bend in nuclear explosions, camera flashes, and caustic overhead lights. In Kentaro Ikegami’s “WAVES,” there’s little of it; white umbrellas cover the brightest bulbs. The show’s title refers to physician Shuntaro Hida’s account of the United States’ nuclear bombing of Hiroshima—a “black tidal wave” not of water but of heat, then darkness and dread. Here, sound waves are altered too: Foam-insulated walls render the room a soft, reverent chamber, like a church, where silence feels dense.

  Ikegami’s “Flash Paintings,” 2016–,