Miami Art Week Day 2: INK Miami and SCOPE

Take’s daily Miami Art Week coverage continues with a look at New England artists and galleries at INK Miami and SCOPE.

INK Miami held its private preview on the morning of December 6th in the decadent courtyard at the Suites of Dorchester on Miami Beach. Though the fair is small relative to its Art Week neighbors in South Beach, INK still features lots of galleries from around the world, from Ireland to Boston.

Childs Gallery from Boston was the only New England gallery showing at INK, offering a varied exhibition from two Alexander Calder pieces to an installation by Boston-born artist Sara Zielinski.

Zielinski’s installation, The Dolls House at INK Miami, was unique, filling an entire room of Childs Gallery’s suite. Every inch of the room was covered in printed fabrics, hand-sewn works and printed messages ranging in tone from emo to depraved.

Detail of Sara Zielinski’s installation at Childs Gallery entitled The Doll’s House

The install description sums up the work as “an immersive printed environment for fair-goers to explore,” but it seems much more personal than that. Whether we’re staring into Zielinski’s actual inner world or some version of what every girl (or grown woman) does in her bedroom, Zielinski’s careful placement and crude human figures call us back to our own alone-time memories and late-night journal-scribblings. In the same way that artists like Kathleen Hannah revealed themselves to us through their early bedroom pop musics, Zielinski revealed to INK Miami attendees just what it’s like inside the mind, life and room of another.

The SCOPE preview was next, and was quite the contrast to INK in size and style. SCOPE, much like UNTITLED (they are neighbors on the beach by the way), programs a packed fair, featuring a seemingly endless lineup of galleries from all over the world, works of all kinds, and different programming throughout the week.

The Bridge – 2017, 85 x 104 acrylic on canvas

Though we could easily talk about the hyper-minimalist artists emerging from Seoul and our favorite strange large-scale installation (head to our Instagram page for those broader, up-to-the-minute insights), we’ll focus on the handful of galleries from New England.

Clark Gallery from Lincoln, Massachusetts, was stationed near the entrance to the fair showing several artists, some of whom are from New England. Dana Salvo, owner of Clark Gallery, pointed us to Jessie Morgan, a Boston-based abstract painter whose work hung in the middle of the booth beside North Adams, Massachusetts painter Warner Friedman.

Aureus Gallery from Providence, Rhode Island, was on the opposite side of the fair (Aureus is also showing some other artists up the road at AQUA). In addition to a daunting number of nationally well-known and international artists, Aureus Gallery featured a few artists making work in Rhode Island — sculptor Laura Kramer and painter Karim Hamid.

Selected work for “Unafilliate.us” by Tom Fruin

Just as we thought we’d seen most, if not all, the galleries and organizations from New England at SCOPE, we stumbled upon the “Unafilliate.us” exhibition, one of the Programs + Special Projects presented at SCOPE. A product of Craft Guile and Boston-based Column Health’s recent initiative to “help de-stigmatize mental illness and the disease of addiction,” the show at SCOPE features intricate quilts sewn from tiny drug baggies and hanging neon nooses by renowned New York artist Tom Fruin. All folks who visited the booth walked away with addiction counseling materials, and, surprisingly, one dose of Narcan with proper instructions for how to administer it on someone who’s overdosing.