Boxwood: Loop Menagerie

Sigh Kicks opened for Jose Ferrer's Moon Garage EP release party at Will Call Miami last Friday the 3rd. Their abundance of reverb, delayed phantom echoes, and playful repetition of violet and magenta tones created an all-consuming atmosphere, setting the tone for Boxwood's forthcoming ambiance. Upon meeting Ferrer, I learned of his background as an illustration major at Manhattan's School of Visual Arts, and was enchanted by the hand made packages holding his CDs. Inside two wooden squares bound by burlap and printed upon in black ink, the verso displayed small booklets of cut-up psychology textbook pages, hiding brief gems of lyrics within. The recto held the CD against a slab of grey house paint, picturing dark tree bark. He also let me take a business card: a slice of his prior vinyl record with stickers to his links. I was reminded of the business cards we were asked to make at DASH for portfolio reviews.

At midnight against a maroon velvet curtain, Ferrer began setting up electronic loops with his sampling pad by creating a beat on the wooden TV tray stand it sat on. Immediately from the island of pedals and wires he stood on came a sound from his acoustic guitar that I did not expect at all: a highly processed, distorted buzzing melody, filling the bar. He constructed an ecosystem of slow tribal beats, chattering chirping sounds, abstract lyrics and passionate cries layered upon each other, calling from all sides and corners of the building we were in. Throughout the show I saw parallels to the lushness and atmosphere of shoegaze, the anguish and abstraction of Radiohead, and the rhythms of Middle Eastern music. I've included a picture of the pedals and tools used to create a palette of smooth, electronic, gritty and crisp textures on his guitar covered in bright punchy and sliced-up stickers. A total of eight to nine songs were performed and the crowd was very responsive and loved the music. This eclectic artist is one of the few artful gems of local music, and you can go to Facebook and Bandcamp to support his craft and hear his previous work. 

UN.SUIT.ED: Perception of Contemporary Women

The Artisan Lounge is a ministry of Christ Fellowship Downtown, a leasing studio community and gallery space, seeking to bridge the gap between the faith world and the art world of Miami. Abraham Metellus is the current director.

This April's First Friday Downtown Art Walk exhibition UN.SUIT.ED at The Artisan Lounge featured the work of locals Toa Castellanos and Alessandra Santos. The women both showcased their photography, installations, prints, and work with textiles in regards to the idea of perception, judgments and their correlation to the clothing we wear. The show can seem to be women-centric although the idea extends to any person in any instance. Amongst mixed media collages of disproportionate, magazine-flat women characters, certain pieces spoke to me more clearly than others, which I will discuss here.

Photo courtesy of the author. Castellanos' Asking For It in Gallery 1.

In Gallery 1, Castellanos had hanging on the first wall a series of outfits: one for leisure out on the town, one for work, a schoolgirl uniform, a grandmother's house cleaning robe, and church-friendly attire. The title of the display is Asking For It, and below the title, a small list of statistics regarding sexual assault. Castellanos has embodied the principle that the outfit one may wear in one specific environment reflects only the environment's call for dress code and not the individual's inherent moral code or disposition. This universal fact is specifically applied to the example of female rape/assault victims and brings up the popular question: whose fault is it? Does the fact that a woman consciously dresses in a certain outfit mean she is anticipating or desiring unwanted sexual communications? Which factors feed our perception of a woman in such an outfit?

On the other side of the wall, a small row of ten wood blocks displayed greyscale photos of multiracial women in burqas, head wraps, luxurious fur coats, swimsuits or casual wear. With five photos duplicated, five have the word "freedom" superimposed on the image, and the other five bear the word "oppression". In removing color to further simplify the objective qualities of the images, Castellanos intends to show us the idea that to some a skimpy swimsuit is freedom for women, and to others it is oppression. The oppressor could be anybody from the media to the "patriarchy" to the phenomenon of objectification to social codes and expectations that say women should bear all and and be proud of their own skin. To some, a traditional burqa or veil is freedom to express religion or faith, freedom to hold tradition dear, freedom to find and build personal identity in either of these, and to some it is viewed as oppression. Did you have a certain picture of race/ethnicity or a certain stereotype come to mind when you read the first sentence of this paragraph? That's probably exactly what you would see if you were to visit the exhibition in person, and this was another point the artist wanted to make.

In Gallery 2, an installation titled Shame. Vanity. Identity. daintily hung from the gallery walls. A patchwork of various clothing templates, transparent blue and tan papers, were attached only by fabric pins and floating subtly in the air conditioning draft. These easily disposable templates, geometric curves and lines, measurements and gradients of size, are elevated to the socially-constructed significance of the clothing on the streets of Miami right now, by the fact that they are hanging as art in a gallery at this moment. Another idea presented is that of body diversity: while many agree the media focuses on a narrow set of body sizes as ideals for society's attractiveness and health, this installation reminds us that the average person in America can be a variety of body types, and that clothing manufacturers still create clothing for those bodies.

In Gallery 3, Santos' sequences of sepia photos and neatly rolled, silky fabric pieces were presented on silver pedestals low to the ground. Clothing tags, papers, seams and buttons are flipped over and displayed with the sterility of forensic evidence, as if searching for a guilty offender. The piece is called In Between: Deconstructing An Identity. The display is akin to a gory autopsy, with the structure of various blouses laid bare, vulnerable, turned inside out. The photos show loose narratives, the process of deconstruction as Santos took a seam ripper to the tops like a surgeon, capturing the various textures of buttons, frayed stitching, hair, and eyes astounded. These inanimate shirts were decapitated, separated and reassembled in a Frankenstein fashion (no pun intended). This installation speaks to the embodied personality of individual articles of mass-produced clothing; the essences and attitudes they are instilled with from the preliminary sketches of the anonymous designers at the headquarters of a franchise. Are clothes deceitful, facetious, deceptive? Who gives them that power, and who can take it away?

I am impressed with the way the topics of this show were addressed given the obligatory absence of nudity. The main purpose of clothing is to conceal distracting flesh and certain organs considered private and personal by society. My response to this exhibit, and society, is: could nudism and naturalism ever be accepted on a large scale? What kind of mentality would people need in order to thrive, feel comfortable, safe, and expressive in a nudist environment?




Save for Santos' contribution regarding the suit, this exhibit could have been in danger of being female-centric, on the surface. It is true that women currently face a lot of opposition in our culture related to clothing; and Castellanos' portfolio specifically focuses on women in society, but it sets the show apart to see these concepts presented with gender-neutral social constructs in mind as well. Or rather, with gender being such a huge factor in the creation of clothes and use of them as expression, does it matter how it is presented, or if it were to be out of neutrality removed from an exhibit like this? Otherwise, the show is quite successful.


Toa Castellanos is a resident at the Lounge in studio A7 and is a part of the collective women art group W10. You can find links to more info here.

Alessandra Santos is a resident of Miami and friend of Castellanos.

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