Location: Walgreens Windows, 2300 Collins Ave, Miami Beach (23rd St. and Collins Ave.)

With this series of abstract paintings, Brooklyn-based artist Matthew Deleget explores the connections between two seemingly disparate forms of creative output: minimalist painting and salsa music.  To determine the title, color palette, and composition for each painting, Deleget used the random Shuffle feature on his iPod and a playlist of songs by the salsa supergroup Fania All Stars. This group originated in the 1960s in New York City, around the same time and place that Minimalism developed. By using the randomness of a shuffled playlist, Deleget is able to remove any semblance of the human gesture, creating work that both adheres to the tradition of minimalism and is informed by the vibrant grooves of the Fania All Stars. In connecting the visual and the sonic, Deleget’s practice extends the synesthetic experiments of  early 20^th century artists such as Vassily Kandinsky (Russian, 1866-1944) and Arthur Dove (American, 1880-1946), and his work also identifies—both formally and conceptually—with the notable jazz-influenced Broadway Boogie Woogie, 1943, by Piet Mondrian (Dutch, 1872-1944).

Matthew Deleget’s work has been featured internationally, including at MoMA/P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Ithaca, New York; Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, Indianapolis; Hunter College Times Square Gallery, New York; Alejandra von Hartz Gallery, Miami; and Cress Gallery of Art, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, Tennessee, among others. In 2003, along with his wife, artist Rossana Martinez, Deleget founded MINUS SPACE, a gallery dedicated to the contextualization of reductive-based art.

Location: Collins Park

’Two silent figures are dreaming and talking with colors. They are sharing a silent conversation in the sky of Miami – a conversation from their hearts,’ explains Jaume Plensa about his new, site-specific installation Poets in Miami in Collins Park. Two identical, internally-lit, resin figures symbolically converse by constantly changing colors – green, blue, yellow, purple – twenty feet above the busy traffic and noise of South Beach. Similar to Plensa’s family of totem works, the forms were inspired by holy ascetics and philosophers who contemplated humanity and preached to crowds seated atop pillars during the Byzantine Empire. Spirituality and the soul have long been areas of exploration in Plensa’s artwork. Poets in Miami presents a modern-day space for meditation to the South Beach community, and invites visitors to look inward to find a common universal truth: an idea at the core of Plensa’s practice.”

Location: Collins Park

Ugo Rondinone is known for his widely discursive practice through which he meditates on the experiential qualities of the everyday. Skillfully traversing the boundaries between public and private, exterior and interior, he reveals and displaces the processes of how cultural meaning is produced and distributed. At tc: temporary contemporary, Rondinone presents a new 16-foot-tall sculpture cast from a 2000-year-old olive tree. Fabricated in aluminum and coated in white enamel, the sculpture is cast from a tree found in the countryside outside of Naples. This new work furthers the artist’s investigation of themes of time and displacement, and the relationship between natural and artificial environments. ’What interests me about the 2000 year-old trees,’ explains Rondinone, ‘is the fact that once they are cast bare naked they become a memoriam of condensed time. Through a cast olive tree you can not only experience the lapse of real time, that is lived time, frozen in its given form, but through this transformation also a different calibrated temporality. If my work in general has a nonlinear approach to the world, then the system and concept of time, which has occupied my work since the beginning, gives me a certain sense of grounding.’

Location: Collins Park

Untitled (The Space Beneath Us) represents a spatial and architectural reinterpretation of the ’Homage to the Square’ series of paintings by Joseph Albers. Davila inserts three-dimensional planes into the landscape, thereby subverting painting into sculpture, and observation into activity. The flooring is composed of traditional handmade Mexican Tlaquepaque ceramic tiles, which relates to the various materials – glass, vinyl, metal — that Davila has implemented in other re-appropriations of Albers’ color schematics, in cases situating his practice under the term of ’Neo-povera.’ Davila has used elemental forms and materials to refer to the works of artists and architects throughout the history of art. Albers’ study of space, color, repetition and purity of form, through mathematically precise representations, have challenged and engaged Davila’s practice whose reinterpretation in the form of handmade and imperfect ceramics, breaking from Albers original precision and leaving certain formal aspects to uncertainty (the kiln deforms the square and manipulates the color of the ceramic pieces), reflect the character of conceptual art and its statement that it is the content and not the form.

Location: Collins Park

“Stretching across an arc of political inflection and poetic gesture, Lourival Cuquinha’s work emerges as a site of challenge that invites the viewer to question the position of art in the negotiations around freedom. The artist explains: ’The idea of hanging clothes in huge shafts, both inside cities and outside them, occurred to me after observing a habit of the people who live in the Santo Amaro community (favela) in Recife, in the northeast of Brazil. A varal or clothes line is a natural urban intervention for those people who don’t have enough space to dry their clothes. They modify the landscape for a very functional reason. Re-using this action and giving it gigantic dimensions is the main idea of the work. This increased my interest in social habits and their representations. I collect the clothes locally, asking for donations. The donors become the authors of the piece, and their clothes carry their customs and memories. The work represents a micro-social geographic empowerment of the favela’s residents, who turned the public space into something useful, without aesthetic intentions. They created their own means of access to what the Brazilian government doesn’t provide. Varal is a metaphor for this social situation.’”

Location: Collins Park

Love Stream #2, Randy Polumbo’s most ambitious and monumental work to date, transforms a vintage Airstream aluminum trailer into a stimulating experiential wonderland, part amusement-park attraction and part psychoanalytic intervention. Polumbo combines glass and innovative lighting to create environments that speak to our world of pleasure and sensuality. He invites viewers to immerse themselves in an exotic and lurid Garden of Eden blooming with voluptuous hand-blown glass flora sprouting from every surface. Evoking images and objects from floral forms to children’s toys, “they become emissaries of love in all its forms, part Dr. Frankenstein and part Dr. Freud.” Polumbo infuses troubling topics with alchemical salvation, rendering the truth and beauty “at the heart of dark matters, colonizing the unconscious with colorful seeds.” Polumbo’s interest in alteration and transformation range from early mad science projects with medical supplies, sporting goods, and sex toys, to monumental, hand-blown glass and crystal proliferations of blossoms. Symbolic colonization, pollination, and retooling of libidinal and biological systems are part of his practice.

Location: Collins Park

Twin Vortexes is the first of six large sculptures by Alice Aycock to be realized for her project ‘Park Avenue Paper Chase,’ which will open in spring 2014 on Park Avenue, New York, in six locations between 52^nd and 57th Street. The presentation in Miami Beach  is the world premier of a full scale work from this series. In her own words the artist describes the project as follows: “Much of my work in both the public and private spheres has been a meditation on the philosophical ramifications of technology from the simplest tool (the arrowhead and the plow) to the computer. Many of these works have incorporated images of wheels and turbines and references to energy in the form of spirals, whirlwinds, whirlpools, spinning tops, whirly-gigs, and so on. For the ‘Park Avenue Paper Chase’ project I tried to visualize the movement of wind energy as it flowed up and down the Avenue creating random whirlpools, touching down here and there and sometimes forming dynamic three-dimensional massing of forms. The sculptural assemblages suggest waves, wind turbulence, turbines, and vortexes of energy (…). Much of the energy of the city is invisible. It is the energy of thought and ideas colliding and being transmitted outward. The works are the metaphorical visual residue of the energy of New York City.”

Location: Collins Park

This sculpture is constructed out of cast cement units in various geometric shapes, with textures from found consumer packaging, recycled cardboard, packing tape and molds that Mark Hagen made from 47-year-old graffiti from a cement and coral stone wall at the edge of the Bass Museum property. Although the vertical stacking in this sculpture suggests temporal layering, or possibly even a qualitative hierarchy, its modularity and reconfigurable nature contradict this interpretation and create a sculpture that is unfixed, nomadic, and yet a permanent record. “This piece,” explains Hagen, “like much of my work, finds inspiration in the breakdown and complication of hierarchies, history, and vision. My work has been described as ‘disorienting as it is ordered’ and ‘synthesizing the often-contradictory movements of process art, finish fetish, minimalism, modernist architecture, craft, and DIY construction.’ Modularity and the reconfigurable as seen in this sculpture are among my means but also my subjects. Both have a relationship to time, in that they imply the incomplete, the continuous or the cyclic, in opposition to the finished, the completed or linear work.”