FloridaDreamScape and Richard Middlen
October 15 - November 1, 2023
“Florida Fever Dreams” by FeverDreamScape
Above stills from “Florida Fever Dreams”
Tell us about the artwork. What makes it unique?
“FeverDreamScapes is a collaborative series experimenting with painting and video to create an uncanny effect. Through the integration of old and new media, video artist Keaton Fox and painter Renee Silva come together to generate surreal landscapes of static and moving images that visualize the often paradoxical ecologies of the present. Silva’s abstract environments of rooms, foliage, and symbols are animated into Fox’s video collages of limbs, animals, and loss. Contemplative oil paintings reveal new narratives as they dissolve into pixels of chaos and connection. These unusual simulations meld contemporary and traditional mediums together to introduce a unique visual language that continually alludes to a universal but undefined feeling of recurring dissonance. Forever invested in making the invisible visible, Fox and Silva are particularly stimulated by the visceral tensions that accompany politics surrounding subjects that can be difficult to visualize; with climate change, disability, and queerness being themes that routinely guide their joint practice.”
About the artists:
Keaton Fox is a video artist from Florida. Her works reflect and distort the varied realities of our time. Her award-winning moving images have been exhibited and acquired through galleries, institutions, festivals, and museums, locally and internationally, since 2011. Renee Silva is a Boston-based artist and educator who has exhibited along the East coast since 2013. Primarily rooted in painting, Renee expands their practice through collaborations in video, ceramics, and apparel. They have a BFA from MassArt and an MAT from SMFA at Tufts University, and is Art Faculty at Phillips Academy, Andover. This collaboration and friendship began in 2017 after meeting in Boston through a Craigslist ad for sharing a studio space.
“Pyramid and Clouds Flip” by Richard Middlen
Above stills from “Pyramid and Clouds Flip”
Tell us about the artwork. What makes it unique?
“In an effort to dissolve boundaries that separate art disciplines, connecting photography to painting to performance, it is my desire to confront and confound viewers in exciting and unexpected ways. Cartoonish facial expressions convey different emotions, smiles fade away and are replaced, organically through melting wax, into negative facial expressions. These less-desired expressions are then manipulated back into smiles. This takes place on a pyramid shaped background, referencing languages of images such as Egyptian hieroglyphics, connecting the intended message to an emoticon-like form of communication. The work examines how messages and information are transformed and communicated by tracking change, and draws a parallel to a societal trend of altering unwanted emotions. The video has a total running time of 9 minutes and 16 seconds, an infinite loop.”
About the artist:
Richard Middlen is an American artist living and working in Los Angeles, California. He received a BFA in Fashion Design and an MFA in VFX: Animation. Richard works across multiple disciplines including painting, sculpture and video. His interest in textiles, form and composition is evident in his work. His work embodies the inner child within us all. Working with unconventional materials and approaches, his work is as surprising as it is entertaining.