Coming Soon Everything Must Go
Miami Basel Art Week, 2019
East Flagler St. Mall, Miami, FL
GOOD TO KNOW presents WE BUY GOLD
48 East Flagler Street, Miami, FL 33131, United States
Opening: Thursday, December 5, 2019 7-11 pm
Exhibition Date: December 5th- January 14th
Gallery Hours: Mon- Saturday 12- 6 pm
The curatorial collective, GOOD TO KNOW present their third annual large-scale and site responsive exhibition for Miami Art Week titled WE BUY GOLD. WE BUY GOLD is an exploratory activation of an 80s' retro-mall in Downtown Miami’s jewelry district. The exhibition highlights the neighborhood's culture, history and local businesses focusing on the gold-trade and the nostalgic mall experience. Participating artists further consider the implications of the Jewelry districts neon storefronts in relation to their own sentiments with the seemingly ubiquitous mineral.
Coming Soon Everything Must Go is a custom marquee created for the 48 East Flagler Street Mall in downtown Miami as part of the exhibition We Buy Gold - curated by Good to Know for the occasion of Miami Art Week in December, 2019.
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Coming Soon Everything Must Go illuminates the ever shifting nature of commercial spaces and the aesthetic byproducts that result. The work is made up of 15, backlit, stretched vinyl panels that run for 38’ along East Flagler Street, serving as a meta-marquee for the mall and it’s businesses. The panoramic run of the installation displays a graphically disjointed message. The various panels seem to have once comprised a more coherent series of designs but now find themselves flipped on end or shuffled out of order, resulting in a marquee that does not help to sell anything in particular but allows us to consider the efforts of commercial enterprise more broadly.
The processes employed in Coming Soon Everything Must Go are directly tied to the commercial landscape it explores. The work approaches storefront awning vinyl - specifically the product Cooley Brite - as a painter or printmaker would build up an image. Parts of the colored vinyl are removed using solvents while other shapes are created through the use of applied vinyl overlays. In each instance the materials allow light to pass through, creating stained glass effects from the material language of the working class.
Both the means of production and the visual sensibility of the work put it in conversation with its surroundings in downtown Miami. Flagler Street itself is lined with numerous businesses which rely on storefront awnings to sell their services and distinguish their offerings from their neighbors. Inevitably, some of these businesses succeed while others fail to hold on. New businesses move into those familiar spaces and customize their awnings and facades to write the next chapter of stories. Our downtowns are built on this collage - a mashup of sensibilities and visions from successive waves of entrepreneurs. Coming Soon Everything Must Go hovers as a testament to the tenacity of these efforts and the wonderful compositions that accumulate along the way.
