Dimensions Variable

Dimensions Variable was founded in 2009 by artists Frances Trombly and Leyden Rodriguez-Casanova who currently collaborate and co-direct the project space. With the award of a 2015 WaveMaker Grant, Dimensions Variable is able to double the stipend provided to an artist, or groups of artists, in support their project, to facilitate more ambitious exhibitions from both local and international artists, strengthen the quality of programming, and increase public hours. 

Line Script Diary

Line Script Diary's primary goal is to serve as a mediated and discursive site for the exploration of ideas and executions within the realm of text-based works. Functioning as a quarterly journal, Line Script Diary compliments existing Miami-based publications as a more abstract and inclusive site of experimentation, not only as a publication for the immediate community, but also as a venue of exchange between new contributors, locally and non-locally.

Contributors of the premier issue are local and non-local artists, writers, poets, curators, scholars, and philosophers. Line Script Diary will be available at no cost to the public, while offering honorariums to its contributors. The publication will launch each quarter with a public event in Miami which will focus on the content of the current issue. The premier issue is launched in the Spring of 2015 at Locust Projects, with a performance by New York-based artist Ben Vida, which utilized his text piece within the premier issue as a “script” for a new iteration of Slipping Control.

Open Source Art

Open Source Art is a series of free art-making workshops for groups of inter-generational participants with any level of experience or background in art-making. These engaging and high intensity art-making workshops are led by various Miami-based artists and explore the current processes, inspirations, and techniques of each presenting artist.  Workshop participants are offered extended opportunities to support the artists via hands-on, artist-directed collaboration in the creation of new work that will be commissioned for a culminating exhibition related to the idea of art as an “open-source” mode of expression and creation. The entire project is documented to share with wider audiences the experience of both artist and participant as they engage in collaborative art-making, which will serve as a catalyst for people of all ages, working together in the process of creatively exploring life and community. 

Me, Japanese

Me, Japanese focuses on the life of Jose Kozer, the foremost Cuban poet of the 1960s. Born in 1940 in Havana to Jewish immigrants, Kozer moved to New York and taught at Queens College. Kozer is associated with the “Neobarroco Movement,” a poetic style similar to Surrealism. The film introduces us to Kozer in a similar fashion, disregarding narrative and chronology as the poet reads from his work, muses on his philosophy and his search for the truth about his identity as an expatriate. Kozer challenges us to examine our own definition of identity as we question whether he is a literary genius or a deeply troubled individual finding refuge in his poems.

Portable Editions: LAB

With their 2015 WaveMaker Grant, Leila Leder Kremer and Juana Meneses launched Portable Editions: LAB, an itinerant edition and zine making unit that adds an education component to their existing publishing projects Artists Making Books and Portable Editions. Portable Editions: LAB embraces a collaborative model of project-driven exhibitions, events, and workshops that occur regularly as pop-up events at temporal or like-minded spaces across Miami.

Artist Making Books is a curated project that supports the production of short run artists’ books by artists with ties to South Florida. Leila Leder Kremer & Juana Meneses founded Portable Editions, a small self-publishing operation to foster appreciation and understanding for artists’ books as portable, intimate, democratic, and as works of art. 

Sounding Room

Sounding Room is a meeting place in which sound, object, and gesture merge to form a multi-layered and visceral experience for the viewer. A collaborative project conceived both as an environment of discreet sculptural works created to produce abstract sounds and a series of performances that physically activate objects within a traditional art exhibition, Sounding Room unites artists from both the East and West coasts. Sounding Room also provides a space for local artists and musicians working within similar spheres of interest and experimentation to cross-pollinate in terms of audiences and ideas. Sounding Room fosters dialogue about sound as a medium, hybrid forms, making community through collaboration, and building a historical narrative.

The premiere exhibition of Sounding Room took place February 28th –April 18th, 2015 at Locust Projects Miami, FL. In a series of three performances, organizers and co-founders of the project Felecia Chizuko Carlisle and Valerie George, were joined by Mindy Abovitz, Terry Berlier, Luciano Chessa, Christy Gast, Daren Kendall, Eli Lehrhoff,  and Molly Zuckerman-Hartung.

Transitory Moments

Transitory Moments is a live performance consisting of one male dancer, an all female string trio, and a passing train. The performance will later exist as a two-channel video and sound installation, exhibited free and open to the public at Spinello Projects. Inspired by the passing of time and the division of space, Transitory Moments creates an absurd “happening,” displacing a group of performers amongst the everyday.

Fringe Projects

Informed by world-class public art agencies Creative Time (New York) and Artangel (London), Fringe Projects are site-determined commissioned artworks that integrate, investigate, and interrogate Downtown Miami’s less conventional spaces in a wide range of practices from interventions, to context specific installation, and participatory performance-based works.

Now in its 4th year, Fringe Projects has grown from a component of the three-day Downtown Art Days event produced by the Miami Downtown Development Authority to and independent agency for commissioning site-determined public art on an ongoing basis. Curated by Amanda Sanfilippo, the steadfast curatorial vision of privileging artist’s ideas to realize challenging, cutting-edge works in the public realm at sites determined by the artists holds firm.

Obsolete Media Miami

O.M.M. (Obsolete Media Miami) is a picture and moving-picture resource for artists, designers, and film makers. Kevin Arrow and Barron Sherer have joined forces, as well as their personal image archives, to make Obsolete Media Miami publicly accessible. 

VERSUS

VERSUS by Pepe Mar is temporary installation taking the form of a gay bar. The the installation incorporates Mar's recent body of work involving the artist's own designer clothing worn during the halcyon club days of the 90’s and early 2000’s framed in baroque-style frames and a collection of queer ephemera and eclectic art from Reniel Diaz. VERSUS also hosts performances by queer artists Jacolby Satterwhite and Elijah Burgher, art exhibits by young queer artists including Brian Kokoska. VERSUS offers vestiges of a gloried gay past, now virtually forgotten, and fills a void in Miami’s mainland which is completely without this kind of venue. The project will operate as a real bar, inviting the community to engage with a queer aesthetic.

GET A CLOSER LOOK at other works by this artist on the blog.

Galactic Sirens

Galactic Sirens is the working title of a film and a water-based theatrical performance based on glamorous Miami Beach water ballerinas, Wikee Wachee mermaids, and vintage bathing beauties. All have a rich history in Miami that has helped to build much of Florida's identity. These women create immense power with their grace and fluidity, in and under the water, with strong aquatic maneuvering. Using current day athletic synchronized swimmers as the actresses and recalling the films of Esther Williams, Galactic Sirens is a modern day drama, interpreting sci-fi and native Seminole Indian tribe stories. Underwater becomes a new galactic world where these goddesses fly through the “air” with Miami flair! 

Dressur

With his 2015 WaveMaker Grant, Michael Zell will present a series of public performances of “Dressur” (1977), a musical work by German-Argentine composer Mauricio Kagel (1931-2008), in which 3 players perform a rigorously detailed and theatrically-driven 30-minute piece of percussion music. The performances take place within an art gallery setting, with multiple performances over a three-day period. The structure of the performance within the venue allows for flexibility so that those who choose to observe are free to move about the performance area as it is taking place, and would be welcome to observe some, all, or none of the performance at their own discretion. The project allows for further interaction between audience and performers immediately following performances, providing the opportunity for audience members to directly interact with the performers and experience the set design up-close.

Residential Properties

Real estate speculation, virtual environments, and developments in technology and fabrication now require a reconsideration of what 'dwelling' is. How does the scale of a home adjust in relation to these new, "fluid" elements and forces? Residential Properties explores recent shifts in living spaces through site-specific interventions within an existing house/artist residency in a Miami neighborhood, The Fountainhead Residency. Contributors to this exhibition come from a range of disciplinary backgrounds including visual artists, industrial designers, architects, filmmakers, web designers, and writers.

Residential Properties generates a positive entanglement between creative disciplines, between The Fountainhead Residency and its surrounding neighborhoods, and between local and global definitions of "dwelling." The exhibition widens and deepens critical conversations within the local community about what is possible within the borders of our homes, and invites viewers to reconsider the nature of these borders.

LOT

LOT is a process-driven and research-based project located in Miami, FL that investigates the legacies and possibilities of the fenced vacant lot. Co-curated by Erin Elder and Felecia Carlisle, the project includes 3-5 artists in an address of these unique spaces with temporary site interventions as one of several possible outcomes.

Miami is one of the fastest growing cities in the United States. It is home to a wealthy paradox of influences, histories, personas, agendas, fantasies, exploits, economies, languages, cultures, and dreams. LOT highlights the city’s vacant lots as a point of departure for a considered, complex, and creative investigation of current trends in development, land use, speculation, space, and power.

Untitled

Untitled (Watts – Price/Frye gestures towards the Uprising) is a film conceived to ponder images of the 1965 Watts Rebellion and the scenario of the arrest of Marquette Frye and Rena Price - the catalyst for the Rebellion, the pantomime of the encounter - as well as images of present-day landscape of Watts, Los Angeles, West Coconut Grove and Liberty City, Florida. Images of the 6-day Uprising centered in Watts were broadcast widely and became a clarion call for resistance and solidarity, heard across many cities in the United States and the world.  The film considers the dialogue between sites and landscape shaped by a common view on history and power structures. Through footages of walks and drives, the film depicts the landscape of Los Angeles and Miami as scenes within a larger narrative of criticality of place. Expanding on artist Adler Guerrier's photographic work engaging the flaneur and a series of videos that trace movement through the cityscape, this new film continues a conversation on the poetics of place and the resonances of history, taking on a new subject and geography.