Melissa Morgan Fine Art is pleased to open the group exhibition Miami: The Edge of a Nation, which takes some of its energy from the spectacle and success that is Art Basel Miami Beach. Guest curator Steven Biller has included photo-based art (Carlos Betancourt), mixed-media works (Ivan Toth DePeña), installation art (Charo Oquet), painting (Christian Duran, Claudia Scalise, and Liliam Cuenca), and sculpture (Ralph Provisero).

     Betancourt — whose performance-to-photography works captivate collectors and museum curators — is also part of Photoshopping and More: MOLAA Collects Photo-Based Art, a group show ending Jan. 30 at the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach.
Named by People magazine as one of America’s 50 most beautiful people, Betancourt personifies the Miami experience: He is the son of exiled Cuban parents and was born and raised in Puerto Rico. His work audaciously intervenes in human activity and natural landscapes, infusing symbols and interpretations of different belief systems in Caribbean cultures. His art begins in the performance realm — decorating his body (or others’) and choreographing a scene — and ends as a giant, colorful photographic document, such as The Hedge, created in conjunction with Art Basel Miami Beach 2007, and The (Last) Supper, created for the 2008 event.
Betancourt’s large-format vinyls, photographs, and photo performances layer and juxtapose imagery based on personal experiences and extensive travel. He “intervenes” in human activity and manipulated landscapes. His work appears in the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and many other museum collections.

     Performance, photography, and installation also factor into Oquet’s work. “By turning plastic discards of our consumer society into sacred objects, my work brings forth narratives of process, excess, consumption, and redemption,” she says.  “I focus during scavenger hunts for materials on the history and emotion behind cheap and disposable utensils linked to gender, racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities. From the inclusiveness of Afro-Caribbean traditions, I borrow the need to transfigure these objects through appropriation and dislocation.”
A native of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, Oquet creates narrative environments that exude colorful fun and ritual experiences, many of which encourage participation.

     Perhaps the most intriguing of the group is DePeña, who parlays his landscape photography and video works into Collisions and Fragments: The Study of File Corruption, Failure and other Self-Imposed Freedoms, a series of light-jet photographic prints mounted on acrylic, as well as mixed media pieces that integrate wood, pencil, graphite, and enamel. His work deals with noise, static, distortion, and time.

     Duran’s paintings — most of which he executes on paper — tend to be more introspective. “I want to uncover truths and poetics about that which exists beneath the skin, within the mind, and in nature,” he says. “Visually, my work resembles a network of tree limbs and roots, veins and arteries, incorporated with the human anatomy and animal forms. These images are revealed as connected, interactive, and interchangeable.
“In essence,” he continues, “my paintings are metaphorical visions blurring the boundaries between chaos and order, realism and spirituality — observed in life, death, and consciousness.”

     Scalise, a Los Angeles native who earned her MFA at University of Miami, brings intimate representational paintings on wood panels

     The Cuban-born Cuenca offers the perfect foil with her abstract canvases and works on paper.

     Provisero brings a modernist sculptural dimension to the exhibition. Art critic Peter Schjeldahl selected Provisero’s Maleducati to show at Chicago’s Navy Pier Walk in 2005. About a year later, Provisero received the Atlantic Center for the Arts/Joan Mitchell Foundation Scholarship for Visual Artists.