Daniel Arturo Almeida
Dimitry Saïd Chamy
Karen Combs
Marina Font
Ai Kijima
Alex Nuñez
hettler.tüllmann
Michelle Weinberg
Natalie Zlamalova

Disturbances in the Field assembles the diverse works of nine artists whose processes involve sampling, glitches, noise, static, feedback, forking paths and rogue signals to effectively hitch a ride on the improvisatory forces and wayward pathways that present themselves in contemporary life.

Works by artists Daniel Arturo Almeida, Dimitry Saïd Chamy, Karen Combs, Marina Font, Ai Kijima, Alex Nuñez, Hettler.Tüllmann, Michelle Weinberg and Natalie Zlamalova are formed in response to forces of accretion, repetition and randomization that reflect our navigation of life experiences and the data that represents it.

Organized by artist Michelle Weinberg, Disturbances in the Field comes out of her involvement in
two distinct modes of absorbing and making visual art. In a conventional mode, choreographed gestures of composition achieve a balance of elements to arrive at a tonic or pleasing solution – a realized picture that offers a window on the world. Another mode involves repeat patterns arranged across a field, which satisfies an equally prominent human craving for repetition and presumes an underlying grid structure.

Each work in this exhibition demonstrates instances in which a regular pattern skips a beat and generates a digression or detour, a tangent, rupture, intervention or a change of direction. These mutations, sometimes described as “corruptions,” suggest vital, even radical change. The “glitch in the matrix” is the evidence of life brimming over, refusing to be locked in, always serving up possibility.

Daniel Arturo Almeida states of his work, Events on the Democratic Picture, “I was taught that photography was the most “democratic” medium, since any grain of information that lives on an image is equally important as the rest. With this project I address that premise by creating algorithmic reproduction of particular elements within a photograph taken during my godmother’s wedding in the early 80’s in Venezuela. The images become obsessive and intimate exposures. They allude to the fixation of nostalgia and the impossibility to recreate spaces and moments without the people that activate them.”

Dimitry Saīd Chamy’s Open Book is a mood journal that travels the margins between art and life. Photographs manipulated at the moment of capture with an unsteady hand and later infused with colors using software he coded break free from the confines of the book’s pages into the gallery space in the form of corrupted data fragments.

Karen Combs’ Four Winds is one in an ongoing series of large format works using screen printing, freehand drawing, and painting on paper. With images of plants, animals, birds and clouds, the whole is meant to convey a sense of rhythm and power within a wild and mystical landscape.

Marina Font’s Adopted Landscapes depict the landscape as a departure point for conceptual and narrative forays. Disinterested in the photographic landscape as a conclusion, these works explore how to transmute the retinal experience of capturing nature, re-interpreting it so that it is connected to the human experience. She states “For this series, I intervene the images digitally and manually, with colored shapes and tracing paper that is only attached to the print by thread, as on the thread of memory. The added layers of planes and volumes resemble architectural shapes and blueprints, real and imaginary, that embrace not only the physicality of the landscape, but also the emotions they evoke.”

Ai Kijima states “I believe my work shows that textile artworks can have the force and inventiveness of the most lively paintings. Delicate surface details are created with my original and traditional quilting techniques. Lush intricacies are visually rewarding upon close inspection. I play with processes of composition and the legibility of source materials. I find generative power in collage techniques.” Her vision as an artist morphs between Eastern and Western cultures. Pop culture iconography is a constant. She continues, “I intentionally collect fabrics from thrift stores and flea markets. Textiles once beloved yet so easily discarded, call to me. They brim with familiar childhood references and mystery. Materials are sorted into categories like sleeping bags, boxer shorts, bed sheets, and movie banners. In repurposing they are complicated by nostalgia and humor. I re-appropriate their context, fusing ideas. This exploration of subtle visual relationships reveals unexpected imagery.”

Alex Nuñez paints tropical dystopian landscapes in constant flux. Poured and scrawled, dripped and drizzled, her paintings are defiantly glamorous and gritty, infused with toxic beauty – reminiscent of a Miami Beach nightclub floor. Describing her paintings as “time-lapse chronicles of planetary collapse over the passage of eons,” Nuñez builds up her canvases on the floor. Layering acrylic, pastel, glitter, crystals and flaky gold leaf, she creates nebulous glimmering canvases. Layered also, are an encyclopedic array of images expressing the hybridity of all things: iguana tails, palm trees, sea urchins, tsunamis. She describes her titles as “deapan, with their code-switching references to Instagram memes, traditional Cuban sayings, and quotes from favorite films.”

Miami Maps is an ongoing project of Hettler.Tüllmann (Berlin-based designer Katja Hettler and Miami-based architect Jula Tüllmann) in collaboration with the Miami-based Helping Hands Crochet Club. Illustrating the maps of Miami’s districts, the wall pieces are crocheted from ‘plarn‘, a synthetic yarn made from recycled plastic shopping bags. Each intricate map measures approximately 5 x 5 feet.

Michelle Weinberg’s drawings on carbon paper are the product of her invention of “engines of drawing,” highly subjective techniques she has invented in order to collaborate with chance and to resolve the handmade with the mechanical and the digital. Her process of carbon transfer drawing yields half-tones or ghost images: a “pseudo” printing process that resembles engraving or etching. The collection of used carbon papers are “negatives” that retain the layered residue of her drawing marks over time. Eccentric patterns and repeated figures migrate throughout these drawings, disappearing and re-appearing like players on a stage. Mounted in light boxes, their skeletal architectures are revealed. The familiar anchors and architectures in these works become fragile projections, subjected to entropic forces, twinned and dissolved by flickering patterns.

In her freeform beaded tapestries, Natalie Zlamalova navigates the space between intention and spontaneity. She says “The process is an instinct-driven dialogue between my hands and my essence; as I connect each bead, the artwork reveals its own shape, weaving and guiding me through its concentric anatomy. This interplay transforms the act of creation into almost a meditative practice, where each bead carries with it a breath, a particle of the noise that lies within. The resulting artwork is a reflection of the murmur of an inner world, manifesting the layers of thoughts, emotions, and ideas, and celebrating connection and complexity.” Visually resembling the rhythm of Eastern European mosaics, the textures of Gustav Klimt’s paintings, the intricate details of jewel-adorned old relics, or a glimmering morning sky, each viewer is encouraged to lose themselves in the work and find their own meanings within the mosaic of colors and forms.