If you are a resident of Miami, chances are staggeringly low that you haven’t heard of Miami’s biggest annual exhibition event: Art Basel. Revered by artists and collectors of art, the event always sees a large number of art pieces that try to convey the artists’ concerns regarding climate change.
Impressively, this year, the exciting four-day event’s most moving projects on climate change are gifts from artists from the Miami area itself.
Xavier Cortada, a 55-year-old artist from Miami is exhibiting 100 of his paintings in the Hibiscus Gallery in Pinecrest, which is just south of Art Basel’s main venue. The blue and white watercolor of pure visual pleasure is made with melted ice from the Antarctic. 60 of these 100 painting are named after the coasts where have seen considerable exposure to rising sea levels.
Cortada’s other important project is ‘Elevation Drive’, an art project for the public. At a segment of Killian Drive in Pinecrest, murals manifest above the sea level to intersect at four points. He took this initiative further by inviting owners of properties in the area to make use of his mural images to prove that their houses are above the sea level by showcasing them as yard signs.
Photography is proving the old adage of ‘A picture says a thousand words’ through Anastasia Samoylova’s 100 photos called the ‘Flood Zone’. The Russian born photographer who is a resident of the Miami beach took to photography to point out Miami’s hypocrisy in promoting itself as a tourist destination while facing threats because of climate change. Her work is being displayed at her modest studio in Lincoln Road on Miami Beach, known as the ArtCenter.
Local artist Linda Chenug decided to spice things up by mixing art with technology. Her mural in Wynwood shows outcomes of climate change if viewed through an Augmented Reality (AR) software. This turns into a three-dimensional image that presents the viewer with two options when shown through an AR app.
The two options, ‘Be the Change’ and “No Change” produce results which are drastically different from one another. ‘Be the Change’ projects a vibrant utopia that almost feels unachievable while ‘No Change’ puts forward a dystopian society of our nightmares.
Misrael Soto, a consistent exhibitionist at the Art Basel, is choosing to showcase the same street signs that he employed last year. The signs are, of course, placed at selected and carefully chosen locations meant to invoke reactions from people.
One such sign is near a flood water pump in Miami Beach, with the single but powerful word ‘Stakes’ engraved on it, which is a call for action to bring attention to the risk the city faces.
Just this November, Soto saw an exhibit called ‘Sand’ to completion in his partnership with Miami Beach’s government. The city’s Collins Park area has poets, historians and even city officials making presentations on climate change in an area of sandbags- a brainchild of Soto. Later, Soto confessed that it was not intentional to have his project ‘Sand’ coincide with Art Basel as it was solely aimed at the local community and not meant to gather a global audience.
This year’s Art Basel, which ended on a Saturday, certainly lobbied for a lot of change from its artists. It showed how art and technology can live co-dependently, and how art can attempt to help change the world if used in the right manner. Here’s to hoping for more splendid exhibitions at Art Basel next year!