North Miami’s condos are rising quickly these days, from the sugar-cube duplex boxes that are beginning to line Biscayne Boulevard to the skeletal forms that send shadows over the 123rd Street Causeway. A little ways down that same street, two new exhibitions by local Miami artists Rosemarie Chiarlone and Barron Sherer at Bridge Red Studios on view until November 10 tackle South Florida’s cycles of development and reinvention through immersive layered film projections that draw on a vast archive of the city’s demolitions and an imagined cityscape, recreated in both a child’s building blocks and a suite of architectural drawings for an invented community.
Though Sherer’s practice with legacy filmmaking techniques and utilization of 16mm projectors may obscure the footage’s recent origins, all of the work in his second-floor solo show was shot in the last few years. In the grainy vintage footage of its era of origin, viewers of his layered installation Doh! Ville can watch the historic Deauville Hotel implode in on itself over and over again. The building which once hosted The Beatles for their second Ed Sullivan show appearance was demolished in 2022 after long fights with preservation activists after an electrical fire rendered it uninhabitable. On the back wall, the downtown skyline’s new Zaha Hadid takes its futuristic hourglass shape, frozen mid-construction on film. In an era where thoughtless AI-generated content is saturating the web and threatening a new digital dark age, the unfamiliar yet comfortingly real clack of the projected images feels like a deeply personal cataloging of a place already mostly gone. Like the evolution of film to phone, the familiar Art Deco blocks of the old Deauville has been replaced by the sleek, lizard-like new reality of One Thousand Museum.
Other work in the exhibit like Text, Sure draws on the artist’s poetic practice, with lines taken from text messages presented with footage from the Glenn Curtiss Mansion in Miami Springs, another historic site almost razed due to neglect. Planes re-occur throughout the footage, and bridges; there’s always a sense of someone coming, or more likely going. In the corner, an assemblage of vintage CRT TVs loop through the last few second of every piece of film Sherer has shot in the last few years–the time-based collage follows flooded streets and torn advertisements to present an image of Miami in deep flux.
On the first floor below, at under the bridge art space, Chiarlone’s LANDscape perhaps presents a behind the scenes image of this same transformation. Her city is split into unequal quadrants, and rendered in the fragile, movable wooden blocks of a child’s playroom. With the walls blanketed in graphite renderings and sketched gardenscapes for this strange new world, there’s the sense that perhaps a god-like architect has just left the room after laying down the final piece. Hemmed in by gold-painted concrete blocks that form a sort of fence around the downtown, Chiarlone’s work creates an uneasy feeling of confinement, that like Miami this city has built out as much as it can and must now consume its own landmarks and culture in its desire to push upward and into an unclear future.
The installation is dotted by the empty shells of endangered Florida tree snails, a reference to the original inhabitants of this land, who now cling to rebar and hide in the crevices of the construction materials Chiarlone uses to create her cityscape. In an antechamber that’s almost easy to miss, the architects vision comes into full focus: a table is laid out for a developer’s feast, a 2D model of a gated community rendered in detail down to the last palm. Where will it go? I don’t know; maybe on the bones of the world Chiarlone presented in the other room. There doesn’t seem to be much else land nearby left to build on.
The exhibition will have a closing reception on November 10 from 12-3pm.
SAVE THE DATE:
What: Rosemarie Chiarlone and Barron Sherer at Bridge Red Studios
When: November 10
Time: from 12-3pm
Where: 12425 NE 13th Ave, North Miami, FL 33161
More Info: www.bridgeredstudios.com
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