Art Basel Miami Beach 2024: Booth B12

Within his practice, Didier William has developed a distinct and ever-morphing visual language through bold pattern-making and the use of vivid color. William’s recent work largely draws on his memories of growing up in Miami after immigrating from Port-au-Prince, Haiti, as a young boy. Pulling from Haitian history, language, mythology, and his personal experiences, he explores the legacies of colonialism, resistance, and the struggle for agency and identity. His work examines the relationship between formalism – his compositions combine both painting and printmaking techniques and push the limits of figuration and abstraction – and the narrative capacities of painting. William’s representation of bodies, natural and fabricated forms, and their shadows are at once resilient, sensual, and profound. Through these representations, he demonstrates a desire to uproot the constructs of the every day and imagine a different future.

Working across a range of media, Kiyan Williams’ distinctive artworks make visible the fissures and dissonances within dominant narratives of history and American identity. Through an irreverent process of recreation, Williams appropriates symbols of hegemony and invites the viewer to witness gestures of material and conceptual transformation. Vastly referencing source materials from science fiction cinema to archeological sites and extreme geological events (all of which speculate how the world is made and unmade), William’s utilizes cracks and fragmentation as a visual language of what scholar Jack Halberstam call “the grammars of unbuilding.” Employing dense earth as a sculptural material, they call attention to the fractures, the ruptures, the interstitial space, which “inhere to queer negativity, to abolitionist projects, to queer failure and trans-anarchy… and oppose the language of repair that can be deployed for liberal purposes to shore up the status quo.” 

Jessica Dickinson’s practice is centered around the creation of dense, atmospheric abstract paintings that explore shifting experiences of time, perception, matter, and consciousness. Optical yet tactile, minimal yet baroque, restrained yet generous, they offer space for the labor and process of paying attention. Making only four paintings a year, her ongoing drawing projects – notebook drawings, traces, works on paper, and remainders – extend these ideas through their own particular materiality and modalities. While her paintings evolve slowly over the course of a year, her drawings offer an opportunity to arrest a moment or focus in on a singular event.

 

As Faye Hirsch writes in “Jessica Dickinson: And: Is” (2024), “The finished painting contains a kind of ‘inner immensity’ […] and although we know its making has taken place over a period of months, the implication is that an eternity lies within the ‘now’ of the work. For in imagining the time that has produced the painting, and that the painting now contains, we lose a sense of its boundaries and the specifics that constituted it.” 

Rafael Delacruz's canvases feature vignettes of everyday life overlaid with diaphanous blocks of color. A self-taught painter, Delacruz's practice begins with the act of drawing from which themes and motifs begin to appear and reappear. A car, a shopping cart, an apple, a coffee cup morph between cartoonish figuration and dream-like abstraction. Carefully considered surfaces alternately reveal and conceal narrative elements that carry significant personal meaning for the artist. Forms are layered over one another, obscuring legibility, and instilling a spiritual, totemic quality to quotidian objects. Favoring a wide-ranging style, Delacruz's work manages to simultaneously achieve a sense of tranquility and dislocation.

Koak’s paintings, drawings and sculptures use the visual language of comics to create emotionally charged portraits and landscapes. Archetypes, line and color are used to embody the experience of navigating complex psychological terrain and ineffable life experiences. Throughout Koak’s work lies a tension between the flattening of space and the conceptual depth that is embedded in the narratives she constructs. Each vignette provides a glimpse into varied moments of inquisition, awe and fear as her subjects interact with the outside world.

 

“I’ve always worked with the figure, something I’ve gravitated towards as my most direct mode of connecting with the viewer. That said, abstraction plays an important, though not always apparent, role in my work. My primary language of interest is emotion, and balancing the play between realism, surrealism, and abstraction is maybe the easiest way to portray a more subtle emotional impact.” 

 

- Koak in “The Journey to Lake Margrethe” by Gwynned Vitello, Juxtapoz, August 20, 2024 

Xia Yu’s sleek and luminous tempera on wood paintings depict glances at contemporary urban life. The figures that populate these scenes perpetually roam between work and home, drift through city and nature, and seamlessly shift between chores and recreational activities. Life as seen through the lens of Xia Yu appears vibrant yet limited, banal yet exhausting. Xia Yu’s subdued pallet and distinctly textured surfaces tenderly reveal the banal moments of a typical modern life in an implicitly digital era. Each image is punctuated by signature rectilinear light leaks that recall digital glitches, dematerialization, and fading memories. This is the artist’s first time presenting work outside of China.

Troy Lamarr Chew II explores the legacy of the African diaspora and how it reverberates through American culture. His work looks methodically at systems of coded communication and how this is translated and mistranslated within the diaspora and throughout the mainstream. His rich visual language draws heavy inspiration from hip hop culture. A highly skilled realist inspired by European painting techniques, Chew utilizes these art historical traditions to underscore their exclusion of Blackness. 

 

Chew’s most recent series depicts close friends and relatives as “invisible.” In these beautifully painted contemporary portraits, Chew reflects on the various ways in which he and his circle have experienced social and societal invisibility. Each painting is masterfully detailed and carefully articulates its subject with precision, yet the rendered figures are void of key information. Any part of the body not covered by clothing is transparent; skin merges with the colors and textures of its surroundings. 

Liam Everett has established the studio as a site of both investigation and rehearsal. His practice is mediated by a set of open-ended, continually shifting questions as to the influence of gesture, material, obstruction, and the environment upon his work. Rather than offering definitive answers, however, Everett’s paintings further elaborate these questions and act as record of the material encounters that occur within them. 

 

Everett’s process is centered upon repetitious application and erasure. The artist commences each painting on heavy bound unstretched linen and builds chromatic compositions according to a set of self-imposed rules and obstacles. These parameters often involve the incorporation of defunct tools and studio debris to shape mass and construct layers, for example. In other instances, the spatial configuration of Everett’s studio – like the dimensions of a door or the lines of a table – act as starting points. The artist’s authorial intervention extends no further than this, however. While Everett regularly begins with quotidian objects and actions, he does not intend for these items to perform any sort of signification, allowing the paintings to develop organically.

Trevor Paglen mines the history of photography, both for its physical production and its subject matter, to construct questions around seeing. Concerns around surveillance, privacy, freedom, and servitude resonate throughout his practice. Ultimately, he poses the question: what is the relationship between photography and power? While Paglen takes contemporary technologies – artificial intelligence, machine learning, and computer vision – as his central subject, many of his works address the intertwined histories through which they were produced. The function of photographic technologies in the settlement of the American West, the collection of mugshots, or the censorship of military blackspots, for example, points to the ways photography reiterates state control despite its façade of objectivity. For Paglen, the ramifications of emergent technology are more than strictly sociopolitical. His work has considered the extent to which artificial intelligence is invested in the very nature of opticality through this shift towards hard-edged, quantified forms of seeing.