Dec 5 - 7, 2024
Feria Clandestina
Selina Miami Gold Dust
7700 Biscayne Blvd, Miami, FL 33138
Curated by :
Luna Goldberg
Featuring :
Harumi Abe
Jen Clay
Jenna Efrein
Christian Feneck
Brooke Frank
Donna Haynes
Luke Jenkins
Ingrid Schindall
To weather the storm…
…is a conscious act of care and resilience—a necessity in a city like Miami, where living means adapting to a landscape that rises ever upward even as sea levels creep closer. Survival here requires repeated acts of preparation and perseverance: gathering sandbags and hurricane kits, fastening storm shutters, and waiting, all while daring to lay down roots and create a home amid uncertainty.
Featuring works by Harumi Abe, Jen Clay, Jenna Efrein, Christian Feneck, Brooke Frank, Donna Haynes, Luke Jenkins, and Ingrid Schindall, this exhibition delves into the inherent tensions of life in South Florida. It explores the intersections of the natural and the built, the mundane and the existential, the poetic and the mechanical, seeking a fragile harmony within these layers. Against a backdrop of ongoing sociopolitical and environmental change, these artists have formed a community over the years—sharing works in progress, exchanging feedback, and inspiring one another. This collective dialogue has shaped their practices, creating a shared language of themes and aesthetics that To Weather the Storm brings to light.
Printed on found water management plans for the city of Miami, Ingrid Schindall’s Best Laid Plans is a sculptural artist book that pairs screen-printed ocean waves with a poem by the artist. Layered onto city blueprints, the work meditates on the tension between human attempts to control the environment and the vast, untamable power of the ocean, raising questions about our current environmental crisis.
Jenna Efrein similarly addresses humanity’s impact on Florida’s fragile ecology, using dark humor and recycled bottle glass. Her work, Catch of Day, suspends a fisherman’s net from the ceiling, filled with vibrant green fish crafted from Topo Chico bottles. Playfully yet poignantly, the piece reflects the experience of fishermen casting their nets for bait, only to haul in trash and lifeless fish—a stark commentary on environmental degradation and the unintended consequences of human activity.
While Efrein critiques ecological harm, Luke Jenkins draws inspiration from nature to explore materiality and process through handmade furniture. Jenkins’s piece, Flight, is a lighting fixture that emulates the intricate effects of termites on wood, employing industrial carving techniques to achieve a similar result. The exterior features large, overlapping termite-like patterns swarming around an LED, transforming what might otherwise be destruction into something unexpectedly beautiful. On the interior, a contrasting linear starburst pattern is carved, and together these designs allow the wood to flex—much like how termites weaken wood through their burrowing. Negative space is created where the interior and exterior patterns overlap, allowing light to radiate through and revealing a delicate balance between the natural and industrial ingenuity.
Donna Haynes also merges fine handicraft with intense fabrication techniques. Drawing from found and treasured objects imbued with memory, she creates delicate assemblages that weave together bobbins of thread, handwoven lace, family photographs, and other elements to craft personal and nostalgic narratives. Danseuse Serpentine, for instance, incorporates a yellowed French newspaper clipping of a sketched dancer framed by paper cutouts, agile red markings and layers of mechanically produced paper cuttings and handwoven lace—a skill Haynes taught herself during the pandemic. By stitching together these seemingly disparate elements, Haynes transforms altered objects and artifacts into constructions that uncover new narratives.
Jen Clay, too, works with traditional craft mediums to create large sensory textile works inspired by the woods of her childhood in North Carolina. Using quilted, soft, plushy fabrics, Clay brings whimsical creatures to life, their leafy appendages often adorned with affirmations and temptations like “I’m here for you,” and “you’ll never be lonely with me.” For To Weather the Storm, Clay presents I’ll Be Your Everything, an edition of functional ethereal curtains featuring one of her creatures. The curtains, like the creatures themselves, offer a friendly reminder of the solace and connection we seek amid life’s uncertainties.
Brooke Frank uses painting to bridge, interrogate, and bring minute everyday details into dialogue with existential issues. Heavily research-based, Frank’s work combines text and image, weaving humor into her exploration of fact and fiction. In Time on Hot Days, a weeded flower, plucked by a friend during a walk with her dogs, is centered on a deckle-edged, rounded sheet of paper. The work alludes to both a clock and the passage of time, with the paper’s mustard orange edges radiating like the sun’s heat. With a deft touch, Frank captures the fluidity of time, moving seamlessly between moments as fleeting as a dog walk and as expansive as the blazing sun.
In contrast, Harumi Abe’s landscape paintings explore notions of home, utopia, time, and horror in the sublime. Bridging imagery from her life in Florida with her native Japan, Abe examines her evolving relationship to the land. Her cotton candy-hued palette lends a surreal quality to her work, blurring the line between reality and paradise. In Mundo and Wolf Pen Gap, created during the COVID-19 pandemic, lush vegetation overtakes deserted environments, accentuating the tension between idyllic beauty and haunting isolation.
Christian Feneck’s painting practice, meanwhile, is rooted in architectural and manmade space. While his works evoke structural and physical elements, his use of color and dimension invites viewers to project themselves into the perceptual and ephemeral qualities of our built environment. It is only upon closer inspection of works like 22011 that their sculptural qualities and intricate layers of patterning across various planes fully emerge, reshaping our sense of space and dimension.
Feneck’s work offers a counterpoint to Abe and others in the exhibition, shifting focus from the natural and physical to the perceptual and transient aspects of the built environment—elements perpetually at stake in this unpredictable environment. Together and individually, these artists engage in a multifaceted conversation about place, environment, artistic evolution, and community. To Weather the Storm reminds us that, despite the uncertainties of the future, it is the resilience we cultivate and the company we keep that keep us rooted in this shared home.
Luna Goldberg