Art Basel Miami – Day 4

By Dina Deitsch

After the big fair, the two of the smaller-scale fair offerings – Pulse and Nada were welcomed visits.

Although the power was in flux during my visit – literally – the lights were dark in about a third of the fair – the energy at Pulse seemed properly pumped. Impulse, Pulse’s smaller side show, featured Boston’s Ellen Miller Gallery who had a solo presentation of everyone’s favorite Deb Todd Wheeler. A boat and remarkableseascapes made out of scans of plastic bagsfilled the booth nicely with a timely and elegant message about landscape. An aisle over, Elizabeth Leach hade a wall of New Hampshire-based Anna von Merten’s hand-stitched quilts from her newest series You and Me which will be on view in the deCordova Biennial this coming January. Subtle white and grey stitching on black fabric sketch out the fluctuating poles of energy. Metaphors of relationships turned a bit more literal with the fair’s fading lights…

Boston’s Rachel Perry Welty showed two new photographs from her Lost in My Life series with Yancy Richardson that are nothing less than stellar. Coming off of two magazine spreads that span the cultural spectrum – Harvard Business Review and Vogue – Welty continues this witty series of drowning herself in things. This time she uses receipts – some of which come right out her installation at deCordova back in January. And Sharon Harper, one of Cambridge’s best photographers, had work at Rick Wester Fine Art of her latest moon series. In all, Pulse had a fine New England showing.

Heading back to Miami Beach but way up to north beach was the ever-fun and forward-thinking Nada fair. The vibe here was classic hipster, the artsharp and fresh, and the scale, thankfully small and very manageable. A few highlights were Laurel Gitlen’s booth with a fantastic video by Vermont-based Corin Hewitt, another 2012 deCordova Biennial artist. The video is a fixedclose-up shot of Corin building up and taking apart a wall, continuing his investigation into material. Kate Werble lined her booth in black – always a good idea – to showcase Brock Enright’s light work and a marvelous fuzzy ‘painting’ by Anna Betbeze.

But Nada really came together for me with a lobby performance by Hennessy Youngman, a YouTube phenom now the darling of arts programming who riffs off of artspeak through a thick layer of hip hop in his “Art Thoughtz” videos. In His History of Art, Youngman went through the perceptive effects of cocaine on art making…funny and kind of accurate. His foray into the audience hit a peak when he happened on Cady Noland who gave it right back to him. New performance art met its predecessor in this hotel lobby, echoing a sentiment that in many ways, all three fairs shared. New meets a bit of old to find something even newer and brighter in the past.

Till next year!

– Dina