SUMMER RESIDENCY PROGRAM
June 5 - October 6, 2023
Little River, Miami
TOMAS REDRADO ART ́S vision is to stimulate interest in Contemporary Art through an emerging aesthetic that is rooted in history. TRA’s mission is to increase the recognition and reach of Latin American, Caribbean, African, and local artists achievements in the global Contemporary Art market, while promoting its host city, Miami as the world’s primary hub as a cultural destination.
TRA engages in ongoing collaboration with leading initiatives of the City of Miami, The ICA, the Miami Downtown Development Authority, Beacon Council, Enterprise Florida, and Miami-Dade County authorities to expand awareness of local and global painters, digital artists, musicians, writers, poets, performers, photographers, and international media experts in both their traditional and digital forms, with the key objective of revitalizing, up and coming areas of the City and County in strong collaboration with the all the above mentioned stakeholders.
TRA is happy to announce the creation of its first residency summer program on the occasion of the gallery’s third year anniversary.
Following the gallery’s mission to support the production of contemporary art and its curiousness to continue to grow, while providing its representing artists a space to continue with their work, TRA residency will begin June 5th through September 30,
The residency will provide a multidisciplinary art space for the residing artists at Tomas Redrado Art. Its unique and versatile gallery space will allow it to be transformed into a fully functional residency/ studio for artists.
The upcoming residency lineup will begin with its first resident, artist, and filmmaker Jillian Mayer, followed by Paris Kain in July. The artist duo from Argentina, Jessica Trosman & Martin Churba, will take over the residency in July & August, bringing to Miami collaborative tools and practices related to art and recycling to explore with the local community.
In August & September, in partnership with ArtSeen365, artist Edison Peñafiel will be working on new work. During the month of September, multidisciplinary artist Lisu Vega and Venezuelan artist Juan Henriquez will take over the residency to create a site-specific project. The work created during their residency by the selected artists will be featured at various platforms, primarily in December at Miami Art Week and January at the gallery.
Every month, during the extent of the residency, the gallery will coordinate special visits by members of local art institutions such as: Fountainhead Art, ICA Miami, The Bass, De La Cruz Collection and The Ministry of Culture of the City of Buenos Aires, with the program “Conexión: Buenos Aires – Miami”, among others. Additional residency activities such as collectors and public visits will be held to promote the artists work.
JUNE
Jillian Mayer
https://www.jillianmayer.net/
Jillian Mayer is an artist and filmmaker. Through, videos, sculptures, online experiences, photography, performances, and installations, Mayer explores how technology affects our lives, bodies, and identities by processing how our physical world and bodies are impacted and reshaped by our participation in a digital landscape. Mayer investigates the points of tension between our online and physical worlds and makes work that attempts to inhabit the increasingly porous boundary between the two. Mayer’s artwork has a consistent thread of modeling how to subvert capital-driven modes of technological innovation.
Solo exhibitions include Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, Nebraska (2019), Kunst Aarhus, Aarhus, Denmark (2019), University of Buffalo Art Museum, Buffalo NY (2018), Tufts University, Boston, MA (2018); Postmasters Gallery, New York, NY (2018); Pérez Art Museum, Miami, FL (2016); LAXART, Los Angeles, CA (2016); Utah Museum of Fine Art, Salt Lake City, UT (2014); and David Castillo Gallery, Miami, FL (2011 & 2016). She has exhibited, screened films, and performed at MoMA PS1 (2017); MoMA (2013); the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, FL (2013); the Bass Museum of Art, North Miami, FL (2012); the Guggenheim Museum (2010); and the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, Québec as a part of the Montréal Biennial (2014). Mayer’s work has been featured in Artforum, Art Papers, Art in America, ArtNews, The Huffington Post, and The New York Times. Mayer is a recipient of the Creative Capital Fellowship, South Florida Cultural Consortium Visual/Media Artists Fellowship, Cintas Foundation Fellowship for Cuban Artists, and was named one of the “25 New Faces of Independent Film” by Filmmaker Magazine.
She has lectured at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, CalArts, the Sundance Institute, ICA Miami, Carnegie Mellon University, Otis College of Art & Design, Tufts University, Salt Lake Museum of Art, University of Nebraska, University of Texas Arlington, McCord Museum, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, SXSW, Portland State University, Museum of Fine Arts St. Pete, Pitzer University, MoCA North Miami and more.
Mayer’s films have screened at festivals including Sundance, SXSW, Rottenberg Film Fest, and the New York Film Festival. She is a fellow of the Sundance Institute’s New Frontiers Lab and New Narratives on Climate Change Lab.
Mayer is represented by David Castillo Gallery, in Miami, FL.
JULY
Paris Kain
https://www.pariskain.com/
Paris Kain is an artist-filmmaker born and raised in New York City. As his father was an acclaimed inventor and his mother a master enamelist, the fine arts seemed a natural life path. After spending the night inside the King’s Chamber in the Great Pyramid of Giza, Kain was immediately drawn to ancient history and sacred geometry, an interest that has taken him around the globe, inspiring much of his work.
Another inspiration is the Gnostic deity named Abraxas, of mythological origins and in Jungian psychology, represents paradoxical conflict. Abraxas has been assimilated into Kain’s studio art, film, photography, sound design and jewelry design. Additionally, he translates similar arcane teachings and philosophies from various cultures into his artistic vision and relationship to shapes.
His work has been featured in The New York Times, TIME magazine, W magazine, New York Magazine, Purple Magazine, American Vogue, Italian Vogue, British Vogue, French Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, The Last Magazine, and Nowness.com.
Jessica Trosman
December: Solo show art week y Design Miami
https://jessicatrosman.studio/
How does one write a biography? And furthermore, how does one write a very brief biography in ten lines? Who is someone? Who is oneself? Several individuals? And who is not someone? Should we begin, for the sake of starting, by stating that Jessica Trosman has two children, sapphire blue eyes, parents named Susana and Quique, infectious vitality, and a degree in Public Translation? Does it matter that she lived in the United States and was born in Buenos Aires? Yes or no? Yes, but she could have been born in Kyoto. Or in Stockholm. And she would still have fiercely encountered herself.
Shall we mention that she co-founded trosmanchurba, all in lowercase, alongside Martín, that she founded Trosman, that she founded JT: all the Zeligs that merged first name & last name from 1999 to 2019 to play in the premier league of the **** world? Two decades? Yes, twenty years of creating learning discovering looking drawing feeling imprinting making experimenting cutting unsettling laughing. Twenty years, or even more, of speaking the language of textiles. The textile and the textual love each other etymologically in the fabric: they weave, construct, braid, intertwine. So, shall we say that when Jessica starts a new project, she is daring, fearless, artisanal, capricious, unstoppable?
Towards the end of the 18th century, an idea began to take shape in her, an idea that once took shape in millions: to send everything to hell. Although Jessica did it in her own way, rewriting the palimpsest of her life. Phagocytizing the old to make it new? Why not. Why not? Because not! A no that undresses like an onion to transform into a vibrant yes, a yes that unravels the ball of that no, and thus in a divine ebb and flow, a uróboro. For the song “Nú Com a Minha Música,” Caetano composed and sang this beautiful line: “coragem grande é poder dizer sim” (great courage is being able to say yes). Need a translation? Jessica started making sculptures. In a way, she had already been making them, except now she shed a thousand layers to start from scratch. Today they are sculptures, tomorrow rockets? “I got rid of the routine, I cleansed myself, I freed myself, I connected with my past and this immediately emerged; textiles are my impression, my signature, and using them for other purposes arose as a way to elevate them, to take them to other horizons,” she says, decisive, but it is known that everything that ends is always about to begin. An artist with her materials and her machines who appropriates their shapes and colors, investigating the physics and all kinds of tonalities.
Since the 90s, she has developed an outstanding career with thermofusion, which has included everything from the Pritt glue stick from the 70s, liquids that transformed clothing into an iPhone screen, to the multitasking rainbow we created together at trosmanchurba, based on research using machines used by the sports industry, adapting temperature, pressure, and structures of hard stamping machinery.
Then she disconnects color and ignites monochromatic hallucination: she melts, paints, and deconstructs. Jessica Trosman becomes a sculptor and a wizard of palettes, stains, and finishes.
All I can say is: don’t miss Jessica’s textiles.
—
The Argentinian designers Jessica Trosman and Martin Churba will create a site-specific installation based on their residence at TRA during the months of July- August. Their upcoming residency will bring to Miami tools and practices from their most recent work HUMANA at Usina del Arte in Buenos Aires, Argentina (see images enclosed) which took place last October thru December 2022.
The site specific installation to be created for Design Miami: Global Initative: Where we stand?, brings together a set of volumes made with recycled plastic and textile materials. The work composes a monumental vision that stimulates thinking about the transformation, the present and the future of the civilization. The artists Jessica Trosman and Martín Churba felt the urge to explore other bodies, other territories. They reflected on the memory of objects, materials, and processes. They decided to make timeless updates more linked to the human condition than to the hanger. The residual became raw material for his works. Mountains of waste piling up daily to which new stories of those who live from it are added are the stimulus transformative of this artistic process. Some explore finding an imaginary treasure, others recover the materials by classifying them and returning them to everyday life. The beauty emerges from these altered mountains, as unique works.
ART SEEN 365
August and September residency artists are in partnership with ArtSeen365
ArtSeen365 platform will be acting as a liaison between the gallery and the artists for the completion of the residency during the months of August and September 2023.
ArtSeen365 is a platform dedicated to promoting the visual arts in Miami, South Florida, and beyond. It creates and publishes digital content, leads independent curatorial projects, and supports selected artists in their practices and projects.
https://www.artseen365.com/
AUGUST
Eddy Peñafiel
https://edisonpenafiel.com/
Edison Peñafiel (b. 1985, Ecuador) is a Ecuadorian-American artist based in Miami, Florida, United States. Born in Ecuador, Edison Peñafiel immigrated to the United States to escape the political and economic instability of his native country. His unique style integrates video installation and multimedia to create surreal echoes of our world, environments that translate experience. His work uses the migrant as the subject, based on his own life.
His early photographs focus on deconstruction and perception, on the absurd and the political. The use of a camera plays with evidence, facts, and their manipulation in the media. When transitioning to multimedia installations, he delves into socio-economic and political themes. By presenting looped video projections, Peñafiel mimics the loops that shape our history and present. His visions depict people trapped in cycles of circulation and labor, constantly being observed.
His later installations increase the interaction between physical and virtual elements, creating worlds for the viewer to enter that are simultaneously strange and familiar. These bring together the themes of his previous works and the use of provocative imagery to evoke social realities, while evolving into fully immersive experiences.
Peñafiel has showcased his work in numerous large-scale projects, site-specific installations, and immersive installations, appearing at the Bass Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, the Orlando Museum of Art, the Elsewhere Museum, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and the Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale.
He has received several awards, including the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Award, the Florida Prize in Contemporary Art, and the South Florida Cultural Consortium Fellowship.
SEPTEMBER
Lisu Vega and Juan Henriquez
Developing Special Project for Miami Art Week 2023
https://lisuvega.com/
http://www.juanhenriquez.com/
The proposal is to create a site-specific, large-format sculptural installation piece composed of large abstract bi-dimensional forms fabricated on a rigid but light material, joined and intervened by rope weavings. The work is a collaboration between Miami-based artists Lisu Vega and Juan Henriquez.
To start, Henriquez, a painter, will create a set of abstract graphic shapes, sort of imaginary maps from nowhere and anywhere, also referencing Rorschach inkblots psychological tests. These abstract shapes will be fabricated at a large scale in a rigid material (the artists plan to explore a range of materials from rugs to gloss black plexi) that Vega will then intervene with her rope weavings. The surface of these bodies will be approximately 5×5 feet. They will be distributed in the space, hanging from the ceiling through the rope weavings, cascading to the floor as a tapestry, gaining a total dimension of 20 x 10 feet approx. The pieces will be installed so people can walk around and appreciate them from many angles.
Departing from their shared love for experimental engraving, originating in an affinity with the abstractly shaped stain, this couple of artists propose bringing to life, each in their own language, a chaotic yin-yang, black and white being the colors of choice, where the implicated shapes are much more complex and convoluted.
Coming from this shared path but having developed independent practices (Henriquez, in painting; Vega in fiber and fashion arts), they embark on a collaboration between equals, calling and responding to each other with playfulness and pleasure. In a reversal of traditional roles, Henriquez proposes and provides the departing point, the ovule, and Vega fertilizes it by punctuating it in many places and penetrating it with the rope.
Their desire to collaborate stems from absolute mutual trust and curiosity for each other’s work and feedback. A metaphoric representation of marriage, with all its fissures and imperfections, and a will to be together, this piece gives them the challenge not to create a work in two parts. They don’t want to create a Frankenstein artwork but a synergy that is indeed bigger than the sum of its parts. Henriquez and Vega aim to create a piece that challenges but doesn’t negate each other’s work; instead provides space for the affirmation of each other’s artistic identity and the possibility to collaborate, creating something new that would enrich each other’s practice.
Vega and Henriquez will be working on their collaborative piece during September, in a month-long residency facilitated in partnership by Tomas Redrado Art and ArtSeen365.
