abstract landscape bursting with colors and textures, hills and valleys, as a two story cascade of garments that blew in the wind". It took six months for them to collect enough materials and three weeks to complete the installation

Within the same vein stands Tribute (2002-05). Recently exhibiting during New York's Armory Week, a monumental amassing of literal tons of discarded clothing was collected over a span of three years. It rises from the floor to reaching the rafters forming a glaring recreation of youth sprung eternal, a rainbow. It glimmers, shines and glows.

The shifting softness of the hues bounces and roams insisting on filling the room and enchanting the viewer. This work in particular is a science. Each of the many bags contains a specific and subtle tone of a color. Red, red-orange, orange-red and so on... it is not merely building twelve feet high and wide but the art of placement. Each garment from the deep center to the outer ridges has a very precise home in which it lives.

which debuted at the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood, and the site-specific Eden (2003), exhibited at the Miami Art Museum. These works all look lightly to nature. They celebrate in form and color a playfulness that one finds kin to a mystical landscape, a hallucinogenic paradise. Random discarded clothing floats, flutters, twists and turns, forming into branches, flowers, rocks, and riverbeds. The artists draw on comparisons of sustainability, mass consumption, and nature as the barometer of beauty.

Over all their work feels raw, it burns intensely, its size makes it unruly, and its medium, being that of neglect, disdain, and rejection, makes it all the more a comrade than a dictator in this sometimes circumscribed trek through the contemporary art world.

There is genuineness and a conceptual aching in the work of Guerra de la Paz. As in many of their installation and soft sculptural work, there is a line

In a recent interview with artists Guerra de la Paz (Alain Guerra and Neraldo de la Paz), it was asked why they work with such a volume of clothing and fabric, they responded, "it's free!"   Which at first felt like an awkward answer but in revisiting that interview it actually highlights a growing and sustaining trend in contemporary art, that of the handmade.

With the onslaught of video, new technologies, performance, and industrial design in art one can understand why the re-emerging of the artist hand is a welcomed factor. More so the "it's free"

reply is really part of a far wider current where the act of finding or fabricating materials is at it's core a resistance to capitalism and an ode to the, although flawed, 1960's attempts to change the world with the do it yourself attitude. Taking nothing and making something, something really grand.

Perhaps you've seen blowing in the wind over The African Heritage Cultural Arts Center in Liberty City, Miami their first and largest installation entitled Overflow (2002).   On the building, a sixty-foot wide site specific environmental installation, "An

Inner Circle (2004) much like Tribute reflects an impenetrable, anthropomorphic color wheel. Installed on the lawn of Lummus Park as part of Sites Miami, this work shows eight individual life size pieces standing on the grass with their hands clasped appear to be seemingly in motion. The pure pigments and faceless figures dance around toying with their surroundings. Fading from the sun, rips and fraying of the fabrics from the wind and rain are recorded as evidence of their interplay with a not always kind mother nature.

Oasis (2006), their most recent installation at the Chicago Cultural Center, finds lineage in previous works such as the Four Seasons (2002-04),

they tow where elements of experiment and surprise are married under an enigma. To each viewer a completely unique experience is presented.

With most of our judgment on the future being somewhat tragic it is important for us to see works like these, to see the hand of great artist at work. To walk into a room and just be floored by the sheer grandeur of it all without overextending ourselves with the rimmed tirades of art speak. These two artists will take you on a journey into a world of pure imagination without having to step out of reality.