-scope Miami
art fair featuring Guerra de la Paz, Juan Doe, Jack Balas, Justine Reyes, Ivana Brenner, Ward Yoshimoto
Booth#55
Run Dates: December 5th- December 9th 2007
Opening: Tuesday December 4th 3-8pm
Location: -scope Miami
Directions: 101 NW 34th St. (NW 2nd Ave.) Miami, Fl. 33137
For additional information, a price list, hi-rez images, and/or an artist press kit, please contact us
The culmination to the year, "To Move A Mountain" accurately characterizes the monumental scale and timely relevance of the works exhibited by {CTS} creative thriftshop for it's first domestic independent installation during art Basel week in Miami at the -scope art fair. The selected works press the viewer to sort through the distractions, falsities and generalities that populate and inform our inherited notions and understanding of truth and reason.
The work of Guerra de la Paz and Juan Doe anchor the exhibition in their complimentary structure and technicality. The imposing weight and chaos of the free-standing sculpture - Nine, balances and offsets the simple approach of Juan Doe's drawings.
As a mass of found and donated clothing spanning the last forty years and surmounting eight pairs of legs, Nine reaches 15' tall and almost 8' around. Its physical scale overwhelms and engulfs the viewer in a collision of color and material. The visual weight and aesthetic imposition of the piece signifies a heavy and unresolved burden, one that has compiled from decades of chaos, conflict and generational divides.
Almost as an antithesis to the volume of Nine, Juan Doe's repeating images demonstrate an exercise in drawing as opposed to abundance. Juan Doe reduces the task of representation to it's most simplified form with black and white words and images. His drawings satirize the nature of popular news reporting, as it fails to distinguish between fictionalized entertainment and valuable facts. Consequently the dissemination of relevant information becomes inseparable from the trivial and absurd as it is imprinted upon our social consciousness. His pieces mockingly investigate this contortion of information and misinformation as it builds its way into memory and history.
Coupled with Juan Doe's drawings, Jack Balas' sexualized depictions of the male form in "Hard to Figure" unveil a similar critique. Explicitly erotic, Balas explores standardized references of sexuality, and questions what kind of existing framework informs such notions. His figurative paintings relay the symbolic value of images and words to act as contorted signals for value and truth once decontextualized.
In a comparable tone, Justine Reyes photograph "Untitled" exposes the fragility and impermanence of the human form. In an uneasy setting, the vulnerable subject looks displaced and victimized by some obscure accident or misfortune. As one of her largest images, the piece arouses a discomfort in the absence of any visual indicators or explanatory narrative.
In Carmen, the crude gesture takes on connotations beyond the obvious. By inverting the image from how it is commonly witnessed, Guerra de la Paz reframes the meaning and context of this symbol. The laborious detail connotes a confusing indication of value, contradicting assumptions that might be typically assigned to
such a thoughtless subject. By simply reversing the gesture, the viewer is placed in the role of instigator as opposed to recipient. This method questions the inherent qualities of an image, and furthers the idea of displacing something casual and ubiquitous, not to mention the typical positioning of the viewer to the artwork.
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Guerra de la Paz, Nine, 2007, mix media sculpture with assorted clothing, 144x84x84in (366x213x213cm)Image courtesy of {CTS} creative thriftshop, New York.about the gallery: CTS is quality art on the move. Championing provocative content driven work by local and international mid-career, underrepresented, and emerging artists in all media. Our goal is to build an infrastructure that knows no boundaries, one that carries the torch of modernism acting as a vehicle for dreamers, a cultural meeting place for great minds, an international community of interconnectivity and expandability.CTS exhibitions and artist have been touted in many local and international publications, including The New York Times, La Republica, Miami Herald, The Chicago Tribune, Art Nexus, Art Review, Art in America, Art Forum, Flash Art, NYarts Magazine, Magazine, Flavor Pill, Miami Art Guide, Artnet, Art Info and TimeOut New York.
about the artfair:-scope Miami, Miami’s original emerging art fair, returns for its fifth year in Miami, expanded in size and global in reach, with 95 exhibitors from 28 countries, and a new 60,000 square foot pavilion. SCOPE Miami is open daily from 10 am – 8 pm. Admission is $12. Shuttle buses run daily to the SCOPE pavilion from The Standard Miami Beach, the Raleigh Hotel and Art Basel Miami Beach.
about the artist: Guerra de la Paz is the composite name that represents the creative team efforts of Cuban-born artists, Alain Guerra and Neraldo de la Paz. What began as an idea for two individual artists to share a working studio in Miami's Little Haiti, has become an ongoing collaboration that has evolved into constant experimentation. The recipient of the 2008 SCOPE Foundation Grant for artist project “Under the Banyan Tree,” they are are represented in the Saatchi Collection (London), 21C Museum Foundation (Louisville, KY), Frost Art Museum (Miami, FL), Miami Art Museum (Miami, FL), and The Cintas Fellows Collection.
about the artist: Justine Reyes lives and works in New York. In 2004 she received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and her BFA from Syracuse University in 2000. Reyes' work revolves around issues of identity, history and time; and our relationship to these themes in a post 9/11world. Using photography and installation, she examines family, the idea of leaving and returning home, and the longing to hold on to things that are ephemeral and transitory in nature.
about the artist: Juan Doe an artist that strains the boundary between painting, propaganda, polemics, and philosophical discourse in art. He encapsulated a new age aesthetic through his command of the graphic process but with the masterful execution of a painter. His images are non-negotiable, they cannot be interpreted or postponed; they exist now, for the oxygen of the viewers eyes. A recipient in 2007 and 2008 of an individual grant in visual arts from the Bronx Council of the Arts, he is represented in the Bronx Museum (New York).
about the artist: Jack Balas is an artist working in painting and photography, cross-referenced at times with writing and other media. His goal is to make images that are memorable not only via their stylistic variety, in a sense creating flags that signal a kind of symbolic territory, but also to offer the viewer a kind of map where it is the viewers responsibility to build bridges across the middle ground between images and ideas.He has received his BFA and MFA from Northern Illinois University, DeKalb. He has exhibited widely, including at the Scottsdale Center for the Arts, AZ; University of Wyoming Art Museum, Laramie and the Tucson Museum of Art, AZ. He received a fellowship from the Colorado Council on the Arts, Denver and from the National Endowment for the Arts, Washington, D.C. He is represented in the Kent Logan Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Guerra de la Paz, The Family, 2005, mix media sculpture with assorted clothing consisting of 8 figures, a rug, and a chair, 96x72x72in (244x183x183cm)Installation View: -scope Miami, Miami, Fl. 2007. Image courtesy of {CTS} creative thriftshop, New York.
about the artist: Ivana Brenner was born in 1982 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Throughout her adolescence, she lived between the city of Buenos Aires and her family’s hometown of Baradero, in the countryside. She received a rigorous traditional education at the Colegio Nacional de Buenos Aires, where she graduated with honors from Universidad de Buenos Aires (2004).
about the artist: Ward Yoshimoto commingles American and Japanese traditions and craftsmanship in his deft assemblages of found objects. Referencing Dada, Surrealism, and Pop, as well as the turbulent social and political landscape of his youth, Yoshimoto’s wry constructions address an ongoing history of cultural displacement with equal parts iconoclastic brio and meditative, almost obsessive rigor. In this singular brand of contemporary suburban folk art, cocktail stirrers, crucifixes, clocks, and pool balls assume formations as whimsical as they are poignant—the detritus of the American Dream washed ashore, picked over, and reassembled in an attempt to piece together a sense of identity amid the constant flux of contemporary life.
Installation View: -scope Miami, Miami, Fl. 2007. Image courtesy of {CTS} creative thriftshop, New York.
Installation View: -scope Miami, Miami, Fl. 2007.Image courtesy of {CTS} creative thriftshop, New York.
Installation View: -scope Miami, Miami, Fl. 2007. Image courtesy of {CTS} creative thriftshop, New York.
Installation View: -scope Miami, Miami, Fl. 2007. Image courtesy of {CTS} creative thriftshop, New York..jpg)
Guerra de la Paz, Carmen (from the series Friends and Family framed), 2007, acrylic on linen, 14x11in (36x28cm) Image courtesy of {CTS} creative thriftshop, New York.
Juan Doe, Dancing Sars (from the Series 360), 2007, enamel on linen, 36x24in (90x60cm)
Image courtesy of {CTS} creative thriftshop, New York.
Ivana Brenner, Sin Titulo (besito), 2007, solidified oil paint on laser-cut, acrylic base, 20x20x2in (50x50x6cm) Image courtesy of {CTS} creative thriftshop, New York.
 Private Collection Miami, image courtesy of CTS creative thriftshop, New York.jpg)
Jack Balas, Tick Tock 2007, watercolor, ink and acrylic on paper, 23x15in (59x38cm) Image courtesy of {CTS} creative thriftshop, New York.
Justine Reyes, Untitled (Uncle Al) 2007, C-print, edition of 5, 40x60inImage courtesy of {CTS} creative thriftshop, New York.