Holly Hunt in partnership with Edward Cella Art & Architecture, presents new works by Los Angeles-based artist Mara De Luca in Vice City . The installation, opening the first week of December during Art Basel Miami, was created in response to the showroom’s design context in collaboration with Walker Art Center curatorial fellow Mary Coyne. Inspired by the pastel palette and glamour of Michael Mann’s hit 1980s television series Miami Vice, Vice City presents an opalescent mirage-like space, where light is cast in shifting pastels, precious details are fleeting, and reality is no more fixed than the impermanent moments of a hyper-color sunrise.
Occupying the main atrium of the Holly Hunt showroom, De Luca’s installation transforms the space by uniting its designs with a series of paintings to create a theatrical tableau. In some cases, the artist blurs the boundaries between art and design by integrating elements of the environment into the work; pastel blue leather, for instance, is transformed into an illusionistic vista and sky. De Luca’s Miami is envisioned in a state of alternation and unfixedness, like the city itself as described by Joan Didion in her 1987 history, Miami . Commenting on the ebb and flow of success in a city that topographically seems to meld sea and sky into one undifferentiated horizon, Didion depicts a mirage-like “fluid atmosphere” where “diction evaporates in a cloud of smoke,” and surfaces “tend to dissolve.” This hovering ephemerality defines the city’s mythical aura, transience and lucid heat.
De Luca’s paintings capture the inebriating climate of the city as depicted in Miami Vice; the iconic pastels of the Miami sunrise and the transitory shifts of its hallucinatory landscape. Drawing on the graphic impact of high fashion advertisements, De Luca’s paintings capture the dramatic interplay of landscape, light and color. Inspired by the Miami of popular consciousness, De Luca’s paintings draw us into a shadowy, mist-like world; a liminal space of fantasy and light.
Holly Hunt will have extended evening hours on Thursday, December 3rd.
Mara De Luca at Holly Hunt
3833 NE 2nd Ave,
Miami, FL 33137
Ph: 305.722.7100
www.delucamiamivicecity.com
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