Nara Roesler
Jonathas de Andrade
Achados e Perdidos (Lost and Found), 2020–22
If you lost a Speedo in Recife, Brazil at some point in the last decade, chances are Jonathas de Andrade picked it up. Over the past ten years, the artist has been scouring changing rooms for forgotten swim trunks. His installation, Achados e Perdidos (Lost and Found) consists of Speedos presented on life-size cast sculptures of male torsos cut off at the abdomen and legs, directing all focus to the groin and buttocks.
To make the casts, de Andrade commissioned artisans from Tracunhaém, a region in northeastern Brazil known for its pottery. De Andrade was interested in the crossover between traditional craft and contemporary representations of masculinity. In the installation, some sculptures are presented in groupings, some in couples, and some alone, speaking to the sensual and social aspects of bathing culture.
Clearing
Sara Flores
Kanoa Quen, 2019
According to the beliefs of the Shipibo-Cobino indigenous group living along the Ucayali River in the Amazon rainforest, every person possesses distinct patterns and energetic pathways. Through healing ceremonies and vision-inducing plant medicines like ayahuasca, these inner patterns can be accessed and translated into intricate geometric motifs known as ‘kené’.
Used in carvings, weavings, embroideries, beadwork, and body painting, kené is practiced exclusively by women. Nearly 60 years ago, Shipibo artist Sara Flores began her artistic apprenticeship as a teenager under the guidance of her mother. This year, Clearing presents Flores’s wall piece Kanoa Quené (2019), the artist’s largest work to date. Stretching four meters across, the work features complex geometric patterns painted with natural pigments on Amazonian cotton.
James Cohan Gallery
Christopher Myers
Let the Mermaids Flirt with Me, 2022
At James Cohan Gallery’s booth, Christopher Myers has built a chapel for the stories of the sea. Inside a dimly lit hexagonal structure, a gentle glow emanates from five large stained-glass paintings installed in lightboxes. His imagery draws from sources including fantastical water creatures, blues music, water deities, and spirits – references which Myers uses to make connections between the water, African diasporas, and legacies of Black dislocation.
Both theatrical and religious at once, Let the Mermaids Flirt with Me (2022) looks like a devotional space and a theater set. It’s a fitting combination, drawing on Myers’s practice as a playwright and visual artist. During the fair, the installation will be activated by a performance with puppets and original music.
Kavi Gupta
Devan Shimoyama
The Grove, 2021
A pair of shoes tied together by their laces and thrown over a telephone wire can indicate violence and the marking of gang territory. Sometimes, however, it’s a sign of play; just the result of kids tossing something to the sky to see if it’d catch.
Shoes dangle from wires in Devan Shimoyama’s dazzling installation The Grove (2021) at Kavi Gupta’s booth. Several utility poles are decorated with silk flowers and Swarovski crystals. Bejeweled shoes are suspended between them and sit at their feet. Shimoyama made The Grove as something of a monument to 2020, a year marked by violence, illness, and racial tensions. Both celebratory in appearance and somber in meaning, the artist considers the work a meditation on power, territory, and death, representing both pain and hope for healing.
Eric Firestone Gallery
Paul Waters
In the Beginning, 1970
Fascinated by his parents’ collection of African art and by rock and cave paintings, Paul Waters developed a unique pictographic language. Resembling hieroglyphs, his personal alphabet comprises 27 symbols.
At Eric Firestone Gallery’s booth, the American artist’s large-scale appliqué painting In the Beginning (1970) features 20 of these symbols. Made at the height of the civil rights movement, bird shapes stand in for migration from the rural south to the urban north, vertical lines symbolize prison bars, vines represent regeneration, and other symbols stand in for moments in the artist’s personal life. Waters was an important figure in the 1960s Bowery scene in New York, where he still lives and works. Based on observation, his practice is concerned with the patterns and rituals of social life.
Pippy Houldsworth Gallery
Nengi Omuku
To be titled, 2022
At Pippy Houldsworth Gallery’s booth, fairgoers will be able to look into Nigerian artist Nengi Omuku’s studio. Mimicking her workspace in Lagos, Omuku has arranged cushions, plants, and a mat made from sanyan, a traditional Nigerian cloth of cotton and wild silk.
Omuku spent years collecting vintage Nigerian textiles and was particularly drawn to sanyan for its importance in precolonial western Nigerian history. She paints on it too; hanging from the wall is her as-yet-untitled largest work to date. Omuku’s narrative oil paintings are often depictions of interior spaces in which individuals are shown in multiple variations across a single plane: in Miami Beach, a female figure is shown in various states of rest and recline on a sanyan rug.
Discover all projects of this year’s Meridians sector here.
Elliat Albrecht is a writer and editor based in Canada. She holds a BFA in Critical and Cultural Practices from Emily Carr University of Art + Design and an MA in Literary and Cultural Studies from the University of Hong Kong.
Top image: Nengi Omuku, Reclining Figures (detail), 2022. A dark filter was applied over the image for readability.