Adler Guerrier || David Castillo Gallery

Adler Guerrier
Everyday Travails
David Castillo Gallery
2234 NW 2nd Avenue, Miami
October 10- November 7, 2009
Reception October 10, 7-10 pm

David Castillo Gallery is proud to present Everyday Travails, Adler Guerrier’s first solo exhibition at the gallery and his first in Miami in over four years. The artist’s creative impulse is both intellectual and organic and is shown by his love of paper and its natural evolution into artwork and by his contemplative photography of the everyday. The current exhibition includes drawings, sculpture, photography, and video encapsulating the ideas of constant interest to the artist: place and the everyday.

The works reveal a structured imprint of the everyday, in the exploration of the relationship of media to the psycho-geographical, social, and political nature of place. Adler Guerrier sets drawing, collage, sculpture, photo, video, and installation in dialogue. His inspired cultural hybrid between color and plane are anchored by fearless, site-specific subversions of place and time in regards to conceptions of race, class, and culture. Often calling upon the districts of Miami and his own backyard, Guerrier examines the contemporary flaneur in an impending post-demographic age.

Adler Guerrier was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti and lives and works in Miami. He studied at the New World School of the Arts in Miami and has exhibited widely including The Whitney Biennial 2008, the Wolfsonian Miami Beach, and Miami Art Museum. The artist has recently exhibited in VideoStudio at The Studio Museum in Harlem and Pivot Points 3 at Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami and is in the permanent collection of both institutions. Upcoming exhibitions and projects include Afro-Modernism: Journeys through the Black Atlantic at the Tate Liverpool; commissioned works for Locust Projects Miami and a monograph to be published by Name Publications. Guerrier’s work has appeared in the New York Times, Artnews, and Art in America, among numerous other publications.

About David Castillo Gallery

Gallery Hours
Tuesday – Saturday, 10 am – 5pm and by appointment

David Castillo Gallery

info@davidcastillogallery.com

+1 305 573 8110 Telephone

http://www.davidcastillogallery.com

2234 NW 2nd Avenue
Miami, Florida 33127
United States

Leyden Rodriguez-Casanova - Amir H. Fallah

In the Main Gallery
Leyden Rodriguez-Casanova You might sleep, but you will never dream

September 12-October 3, 2009

David Castillo Gallery is pleased to present You might sleep, but you will never dream, Leyden Rodriguez-Casanova's second solo exhibition at the gallery.

The artist uses a vocabulary of domestic objects and suburban architectural elements as a visual language, addressing our social, cultural and emotional existence. He uses material appropriations first introduced in post-minimal and conceptual art. Rodriguez-Casanova is presenting a series of objects that use a room as the point of departure for his concepts. All the objects are elements of a room which have been detached from their original context.

As the title of Damien Hirst's work suggests, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, Rodriguez-Casanova is interested in understanding the loss of someone, including one's self (and the "impossibility" of such). In the work An Open Door, 2008 commissioned for the Dennis and Debra Scholl Collection, the artist built an entirely new wall with a blackout doorway created by a black sheet of plexi. The opening becomes a metaphor for what lies beyond our existence. This same element exits in A Folded Bed, 2009 in which a portable folding bed is intersected by a large sheet of the same black plexi. The black plane once more is a metaphor for a void. In A Bedroom Floor, 2009 the artist has recreated the exact tile grid of his adolescent bedroom floor. A nod to Carl Andre, the work uses its own detachment and "negative space" properties to focus on the floor and its plight in its original context.

Leyden Rodriguez-Casanova lives and works in Miami, and has exhibited nationally and internationally. His work has been featured in publications such as Art in America, ARTnews, and Sculpture Magazine. The artist has recently exhibited at Socrates Sculpture Park and the Sculpture Center in New York, among many other venues.


In the Annex
Amir H. Fallah
Flowers and Terrorists

In the project room, the gallery is proud to present Amir H. Fallah's Flowers and Terrorists.

The stark juxtaposition of flowery still lifes and political statements confront the severe spectrum the world lives in. The artist uses familiar colors and collage elements to blur the line between beauty and violence. Fallah's still lifes "his mother wishes he would paint" are sullied through his chaotic use of explosive color, while the terror-themed paintings are calmed by the easier transitions of subtle colors.

In the David Castillo Annex, Amir H. Fallah constructs a single tower of objects from found materials in Miami. In this installation as in his paintings, the artist combines the subjects of still lifes and political statements, re-enforcing the dialogue between them. The site-specific installation is a commentary on how beauty and terror are ultimately conjoined in life.

The Los Angeles-based artist has exhibited nationally and internationally. Amir H. Fallah is also the publisher of the contemporary arts magazine Beautiful/Decay. Fallah received his B.F.A. from The Maryland Institute College of Art and his M.F.A from UCLA in 2005. He was included in the 2009 Sharjah Biennial.

http://www.davidcastillogallery.com/exhibitions/