“ArtSoBay” Winter 2008 Exhibit
“On This Rock”
is on display through March 30, 2008
The Deering Estate at Cutler in collaboration with LegalArt congratulates artists: Jennifer Basile, Carlos Cardenes, John DeFaro, Ingrid Eliasson, Felice Grodin, Michael Loveland, Federico Nessi, Jay Ore, Vickie Pierre, and Claudio Luis Vera as exhibiting artists for the 2008 Juried ArtSoBay exhibition “On This Rock.” This was our first-ever open call, juried fine art exhibit held at the Estate. Over 250 submissions were reviewed by the Estate’s Exhibits and Collections Committee, led by David Castillo, Advisory Board Member for LegalArt. Only 10 artists were chosen for this highly selective and competitive fine art show. “On This Rock” revolves around the themes of landscape and architecture, which evolved naturally during the review of open call submissions.
M Loveland Image 
The idea of the open call was to allow each of the submitting artists the opportunity to show their current work without the restrictions of a theme or concept before-hand. The title of the show “On This Rock” has many connotations in Art History, religion, politics, and literature. As well, the title makes reference to the theme of this juried show “landscape and architecture”. As the work was reviewed, what surfaced were connections to a city in tremendous growth, particularly in its cultural arena. Recent local museum shows have dealt specifically with architecture and design, as well two local museums are undergoing important physical expansions. This is coupled together with the Deering Estate’s history- “on this rock” which was a private residence very tied to the visual arts.
C Cardenes Image 
The artists selected work in a wide range of media from sculpture to photography, drawing, painting, and installation. Each of them submitted work that is informed by imagined landscapes sometimes directly associated to real landscapes and other times, not. From Vickie Pierre and Felice Grodin’s imagined landscapes to Federico Nessi’s photographic work which uses the human body as a structure in a landscape to ideas of design in Michael Loveland’s work and John DeFaro’s sculpture which also is informed by the landscape of the Deering Estate itself. This exhibition allows the viewer to revisit traditional notions of landscape and architecture and allows visitors to the Estate the opportunity to see contemporary art production in the context of a home which has always had an artistic life.
BIOGRAPHIES
Juror: David Castillo
David Castillo is an Advisory Board Member for LegalArt, and adjunct member of the Deering Estate’s Exhibits and Collections Committee, and an independent gallery owner. Mr. Castillo has been a private art consultant and art dealer, having worked on sales of important secondary market works. His professional background spans more than a decade, beginning with the Yale University Art Gallery, and later, museums and galleries in Miami and elsewhere before opening David Castillo Gallery in 2005. His studies and degrees are in History and Art History from Yale University, and the Vatican.
LegalArt is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to providing artists with affordable legal services, unique events, and educational opportunities. All LegalArt programming helps artists by creating a community both dedicated to and invested in their success. The only organization of its kind in Miami, LegalArt provides a host of legal, cultural, and professional services to the community. For more information on LegalArt, please visit www.legalartmiami.org.
Exhibits and Collections Advisory Committee
The Deering Estate at Cutler The Deering Estate at Cutler maintains an informal, voluntary, advisory council - the Exhibits and Collection Advisory Committee (ECAC) – whose members generally assist with the Selection Process for art or artifacts to be displayed or exhibited on the Estate. The ECAC consists of artists, gallery owners, professionals, educators, et al affiliated with our arts and cultural history.
JENNIFER BASILE & INGRID ELIASSON
Jennifer A. Basile
Education
1999:Southern Illinois University Edwardsville MFA, Art Studio, Major: Printmaking/Painting
1996:University of Miami BFA Art Studio, Double Major: Painting and Printmaking
Ingrid Eliasson Education
2004:BFA, Florida International University, Miami, FL
2001: AA, Miami Dade Community College, Miami, FL
Artists' Statement: In the Winter House Series we are recreating a place from our collective memories. Working solely from recollections, the present and the past are built into one, containing the imprints of experiences and atmospheres. The many different layers of memory are visible in the surface treatments of the houses. Sky and earth come together through atmospheric washes that also function as patinas to mark the passage of time. Our sculptures reflect the experience of displacement which triggers the need to recreate a place of home.
CARLOS CARDENES
Cuban-born Carlos M. Cárdenes is a 25-year veteran of the advertising photography field, with clients such as Aeroméxico, Florida International University, Florida Power & Light, The Mexican National Tourist Council, Seatrain, Rodriguez & Quiroga Architects, Upstairs Studio, and numerous world-class hospitality-industry resorts and destinations. Early exposure to the film and television industry in his native Cuba formed the underpinnings of Mr. Cárdenes’ personal style; at once direct and immediate and informed by a sense of the dramatic in lighting and choice of subject. “I credit the influence of my uncle, a TV and cinema director, with priming my curiosity for the beauty in the novel and grand, as well as in the commonplace and even the vulgar … taking pictures may be an art, but seeing is everything.”
Mr. Cárdenes graduated from the Miami Photography College and holds an art degree from Miami Dade College. He attended the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York and the Brooks Institute at Santa Barbara, California, as well as has participated in the Ansel Adams Workshops at Yosemite National Park. He is a member of the Florida Chapter of the WPB Professional Photographers Guild.
History of Miami River Series The 5.5 mile (8.9 km) Miami River drains out of the Everglades and runs through downtown Miami, Florida. While it is widely believed that the name Miami is derived from a Native American word that means "sweet water", the earliest mention of the name comes from Hernando d’Escalante Fontaneda, who was held captive by Indians in southern Florida for 17 years, and rescued around 1566. The area around the Miami River has attracted settlers throughout various centuries. The mouth of the river is now home to the Port of Miami. Many other business and government offices make their home in the shores of the river. They, along with government officials, all continually make promises to reinvigorate the area; however, its decay is still pervasive. The Miami River Blues project’s aim is to raise consciousness about the river and its surroundings by turning the decay that abounds it into abstract art, and thus making the public aware of its hidden potential.
JOHN DEFARO
Born: Greenport, New York. (John “DeCristofaro”)
Hometown: Southampton, New York.
Lives and works in Miami, Florida
Educational Experience: Self Taught
1999 – 2001. Miami Ad School. New Genre. Art Direction. Miami, FL.
FELICE GRODIN
Felice Grodin both borrows from and subverts her training as an architect, by exploring processes that merge the physical and mental landscape. Her artwork is a fusion of her background and the unique cities in which she has lived. San Francisco’s earthquakes, Miami’s hurricanes, New Orleans’ weakened levees, Venice’s rising lagoon and New York during 9/11, have left indelible impressions on her of the vulnerability and resiliency of life in the big city. In turn, her work posits a contemporary interpretation of the space that we live in today - a contradictory world that is simultaneously global, territorial and essentially vulnerable. Felice Grodin was born in Bologna, Italy and currently lives and works in Miami Beach. She obtained her BArch from Tulane University where she received the Thomas J. Lupo Award for Metropolitan Studies for her thesis project, and her MArch with Distinction from Harvard University where she was awarded the Faculty Design Award. She has practiced in New York and Miami and has taught architectural design and drawing at Florida International University. Her first solo show Cartographies was recently featured in the project room at Diana Lowenstein Fine Arts. Her work is currently featured in New American Talent: The Twenty-Second Exhibition and will be featured this year in the exhibition “Drawing Beyond the Plane” at the Tampa Museum of Art. In addition, she is curating a forthcoming group show at Locust Projects in Miami called “Synesthetics” which explores the creative interface between art, design and technology.
MICHAEL LOVELAND
Michael Loveland was born 1973 in Miami, Florida and attended The New World School of the Arts. He received his Bachelors of Fine Art degree from The Maryland Institute Collage of Art in Baltimore, graduating cum laude. Loveland then moved to New York to further his passions in sculpture and interior design, where for eight years he worked on many large projects with international clients such as Estée Lauder/Mac Makeup and nightclub décor for Jet Corp. Loveland is currently based in Miami and is focusing on his own artwork. He has been showing consistently at such places as Here Art, New York; and in South Florida’s Miami Art Museum, Fredric Snitzer gallery, Locust Projects, Ambrosino Gallery. Loveland is currently represented by Diana Lowenstein Fine Arts in Miami and his work can be found in private art collections in Miami, New York and Berlin. In addition he has been invited to come back to his home school New World to teach sculpture to the next generation of artists.
FEDERICO NESSI
In 2001, a friend told me he believed in the predictions that the apocalypse would come in 2012. Instead of it being the end of our entire physical realm however, he was convinced it would simply be the end of modern society. In its place would emerge a civilization no longer controlled by the strain of capitalism. The corrupt and selfish nature of the modern man would transform into that of self-awareness. The fog of clutter would somewhat clear and our gaze would turn inward. Man's focus would be redirected to the power of the mind. The pursuit for enlightenment would be innate.
His words brought on an idealized sense of hope, a spiritual aspiration to work toward, grasp and hold onto.
I've been trying to prepare for the replenishing light of the apocalypse for the last 7 years. I’m afraid I might be trying too hard.
Born in 1982 in Caracas, Venezuela, Federico Nessi lives and works in Miami, FL. Nessi received his B.F.A in photography from the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, OR. He recently was exhibited in the 2006 Oregon Biennial, Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR, as well as group exhibitions across the country and solo exhibitions at Bas-Fisher Invitational and Diana Lowenstein Fine Art, Miami, FL.
JAY ORE
Birthplace & Education
1964 Born in Miami, Florida
1984 Exchange Student, Avignon Academy of the Arts, Avignon, France
1986 Pre-Graduate Work, Miami-Dade Community College, Miami, Florida
1990 Bachelor of Arts, University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida
Humor is something one not always expects but, welcomed if not done in a heavy-handed way. Ore's works, a series of constellations in the night sky, at first seemed very "Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD)," until one views the work a little more closely to see the configured constellations are man-made (by Ore). Since the APOD is something regularly accessible, one could possibly see the humor in the visual mix up although, in the gallery space the works do not read as instanteously as they do here online. These are really lightboxes, not drawings, nor paintings.
VICKIE PIERRE
Vickie Pierre is a Haitian - American artist born in Brooklyn, New York. While in New York, Pierre attended the School of Visual Arts and received her BFA in Fine Art, painting. Since relocating to Miami, Pierre has participated in several group exhibitions in and out of Florida including The Polk Museum of Art, Lakeland, Florida and The Gulf Coast Museum, Largo, Florida; Kerry Inman Gallery, Houston, Texas and White Box in New York City. Pierre's paintings and works on paper have been exhibited at Art Basel Miami Beach 2002 - 2005. In 2003 Pierre participated in The Caribbean Biennial V at the Museum of Modern Art in the Dominican Republic where her work represented Haiti. Also in 2003 Pierre was selected by the Four Seasons Hotel in Miami as one of three Miami artists commissioned to create over 300 works on paper and canvas for the hotels' guest suites and private collection. Pierre's solo exhibitions include What You Feel is What I Feel for You and Presents of Mine at Ambrosino Gallery in North Miami, Florida. Her most recent solo exhibition took place in October 2007, entitled, Beautiful Collision at Ingalls & Associates Gallery in the Wynwood Arts District in Miami. In early 2006, the artist's work was featured in a two - person exhibition at The Polk Museum of Art in Lakeland, Florida, titled Views From Within. That same year, the month of May saw the close of the exhibition Transitory Patterns, a group exhibit of seventeen women artists from Florida. The inaugural exhibition was displayed at The National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. and subsequently traveled to numerous museums throughout the state of Florida thru 2006. Miami collections featuring the work of Vickie Pierre include Liza and Dr. Arturo Mosquera Collection; Paul and Estelle Berg; Richard and Ruth Shack Collection; Dr. and Mrs. Steven M. Lanster; Cricket and Martin Taplin Collection. Additional collections include The Polk Museum of Art, Lakeland, FL; Progressive Art Collection, Cleveland, Ohio and ALFA - Wasserman Collection, Bologna, Italy.
CLAUDIO LUIS VERA
Claudio is an accomplished art director and illustrator, and his designs have received recognition from Communication Arts, The One Show, the Massachusetts Interactive Media Council (MIMC), HOW Magazine, and Graphic Design USA, among many others. He shares his passion for good design with a special interest in developing media for interactive physical spaces.
Born to Latin American diplomats in Washington DC, Claudio was raised in the environment of that city’s international organizations. He speaks Spanish, French, German, and Portuguese, in addition to English, HTML, and a variety of scripting languages. Claudio graduated from Johns Hopkins University with a BA in Art History and continued his studies at the University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). He also holds an MBA at Boston University’s School of Management with a concentration in the management of innovation and design.