83° 
No Vacancy Miami Beach 2022: Meet the Artists and Vote For Your Favorite
(Miami Beach, FL) Dec 1, 2022 -
Antonia Wright & Ruben Millares, Patria y Vida
Public voting is open for the 2022 edition of No Vacancy, Miami Beach. No Vacancy is a juried art competition that supports and celebrates mainly local artists, provokes critical discourse, and encourages the public to experience Miami Beach’s famed hotels as temporary art destinations in their own right. This year, the largest to date, presents 12 artists creating site-specific works at 12 iconic Miami Beach hotels. All installations are free, open to the public and on view through December 8, 2022.
A total of $35,000 in prizes will be awarded to two selected participants, featuring a $10,000 Public Prize by the Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau and a $25,000 Juried Prize awarded by a jury of local art professionals. Members of the Miami Beach community are encouraged to vote at www.mbartsandculture.org/no-vacancy/. Voting will conclude on December 7, 2022, and the winners announced on December 8, 2022.
The Artists
Maritza Caneca
Submersion in Blue
Riviera Suites South Beach, 318 20th Street, Miami Beach, FL 33139
Maritza Caneca is a Miami-based Brazilian born visual artist whose work spans photography, film, and multimedia installations. After spending three decades as a cinematographer, her work continues to capture detailed narratives found in the angles of simple symmetries and geometries. Caneca’s images evoke the silence of being underwater, and although humans are never seen in her work, there is the occasional sense of human presence visible through the water’s movement. By characterizing this movement, Caneca hints to the fact that images are in constant flux when seen in a reflection––infinite configurations exist and forms never repeat.
Beatriz Chachamovits
Carcass
Esmé Miami Beach, 1438 Washington Avenue, Miami Beach, FL 33139
Carcass is a hand built ceramic installation that approaches the theme of ocean degradation through the lenses of coral bleaching, coral harvesting and plastic pollution. Chachamovits is an environmental artist and educator from São Paulo, Brazil living and working in Miami, Florida. Her work renders tangible the decline of the coral reef ecosystems, and the role played by humans in it.
Brookhart Jonquil
Liguus
Cadillac Hotel & Beach Club, 3925 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach, FL 33140
Brookhart Jonquil’s work engages aspects of the world that lie beyond our ability to directly perceive. Reflecting, multiplying, and shifting, his compositions of glass, mirror, water, and lights create a perceptual world beyond the physical, yet rooted in materiality. By emphasizing space, light, gravity, and lines of force in dynamic equilibrium, his sculptures make tangible the immaterial interactions that are the foundation of our embodied experience. The title, Liguus, refers to a tree snail native to the greater Everglades, after which the sculpture is modeled. Since beginning this project, it has very suddenly come to the brink of certain extinction, being devoured by an invasive flatworm.
Esben Weile Kjær
HYPER!
Fontainebleau Miami Beach, 4441 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach, FL 33140
A new sculpture and performance piece by Danish artist Esben Weile Kjær presented in collaboration with Bas Fisher Invitational (BFI, Miami), and Danish curator Anna Frost, HYPER! consists of giant inflatable carnivorous plants in reflective silver material resembling Jeff Koon’s famous Tulips sculptures. Borrowing this familiar iconography, the sculpture takes the audience on an imaginary journey from inflatable balloon animal, through the solid steel works of one of the art world’s best-known sculptors, to a new version that looks like metal but is soft like a bouncy castle. The sculpture will be activated twice during Art Week by a 2-hour dance performance where Kjær and four performers bounce into the soft sculptures, getting swallowed into its flexible silver fabrics.
Justin H. Long
Angle of Vanishing Stability (AVS)
International Inn On the Bay, 2301 Normandy Drive, Miami Beach, FL 33141
This piece is comprised of a sailboat that is completely upturned, suspended 10 feet in the air solely by its mast. The artist had used this sailboat, Captain Winky, as performative platform for his practice through regattas and experimentations over the last 10 years. Patrons will be able to approach and experience the piece by standing underneath as well as viewing from afar. Through this encounter, viewers can wonder at the balance while contemplating their own stability.
Claudio Marcotulli
Sea Show
Hotel Croydon, 3720 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach, FL 33140
Claudio Marcotulli uses media, sculpture and installation to create works that investigate his interest in technology and nature by illuminating existential questions around these subjects. His projects range from sculpture and performance installations to film and digital imagery that often reference memory, natural elements, and issues of climate change with a surrealistic and existential approach. At first sight, Sea Show appears as a colorful luminic sculpture installed on the wall but then it suddenly morphs. The colored light patterns on the sides begin blending with the images that appear in the seemingly concealed TV monitor in the center, immediately shifting the viewer’s sensorial experience, colored by abstraction, animation and storytelling.
Jessy Nite
In Your Eyes, I Come Alive
Avalon Hotel Miami, 700 Ocean Drive, Miami Beach, FL 33139
Jessy Nite is a multidisciplinary artist based in Miami, FL. Specializing in interactive, experiential and site-specific installation, her bold narratives come alive through an array of pastel-colored typography, geometry and illustration. By harnessing sunlight through site specific installations, artist Jessy Nite uses shadows to reveal messages and tell stories across cities. Using its position in real-time, the Sun becomes the narrator, sharing playful but deeply rooted narratives that connect us to the environment and one another.
Charo Oquet
Maxi-Building on the Baroque
Catalina Hotel & Beach Club, 1732 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach, FL 33139
MAXI, which comes from the word Maximalism, refers to spectacle in fashion. Its beauty lies in excess and eclecticism. Throughout history, Maximalism in fashion is often used in terms of audacious, intricate aesthetics or exaggerated silhouettes associated with extravagance and style. It relates to Baroque art with its grandeur, drama, movement, richness, and emotional exuberance. Colossally huge and disarmingly bright, Oquet’s sculptural installations transform the simple, everyday materials of concrete, plaster, wood, and fabric into durable yet ephemeral-looking, structures.
Sri Prabha
Cosmic Occupancy
The Betsy Hotel, 1440 Ocean Drive, Miami Beach, FL 33139
Sri Prabha is a multidisciplinary artist who integrates into his aesthetic process, tenets of geography, nature, time, human origins, and the cosmos. His works manifest across a range of mediums that include installations, video, light art, sculptural paintings, and sound. In Cosmic Occupancy a selection of three separate video projections will feature elements from ancient forests, lava caves, fossils, flora, and fauna fused with text, moving mandalas, and light fields to encourage and raise consciousness about our place in the universe. A web version with a QR code/URL will be placed on site and will contain longer form videos and NFTs for people to view or use the sound concurrently with the physical experience at www.sriprabha.com/cosmos.html
Magnus Sodamin
A Land Remembered
Loews Miami Beach Hotel, 1601 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach, FL 33139
Creating a 14’x18’ Outdoor Vinyl Mural on a custom fabricated frame, Magnus seeks to captivate the viewer with inspiration from the Everglades. This work celebrates Florida’s natural history, and serves as a window into the undeveloped landscape of the past. For this commissioned work with No Vacancy, Magnus collaborated with artist James Brazil to develop light columns that reflect the surrounding environment. Through this work, Magnus Sodamin hopes tourists and visitors will see a reflection of our local environment and memorialize Florida’s past and present; its magnificent and unique wilderness.
Michelle Weinberg
Treading Water
Royal Palm South Beach Miami, 1545 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach, FL 33139
The drawings in Treading Water are made by slipping carbon paper between folded sheets of mulberry paper, and in so doing, imagery is transferred from one side of the page to the other in a kind of pseudo printing process. The used black transfer paper is a “negative” engraved by the layered residue of my drawing marks over time. When illuminated by lightboxes, their skeletal architectures are revealed. These works express the collision of forces from the natural world with the fragile built environment, especially the erosion and disintegration that occurs. Snippets of texts and flickering patterns are subjected to the same entropic forces as architecture. Banal slogans and notes to self are fragmented broadcasts, set free from normal context.
Antonia Wright & Ruben Millares
Patria y Vida (pictured)
Faena Hotel, 3201 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach, FL 33140
Patria y Vida is a large-scale light sculpture that celebrates people’s right to peacefully protest by using the barricade as a symbol of global resistance. The installation is part of a series of works in which Wright and Millares explore the sculptural and symbolic potential of standard steel barricades. As Cuban-American artists, the duo grew up going to protests with their parents in Miami and believe public demonstration is one of the most effective means of civic engagement. For this new sculpture, 25 crowd-control barricades with LED lights are bound together in a disorderly composition to memorialize global acts of nonviolent resistance.
Each selected artist or collective received a stipend of $10,000 to realize their project at each hotel location. Artists were drawn from a call for submissions issued by the city and selected by representatives from the City of Miami Beach Art in Public Places Committee, Cultural Arts Council (CAC) and MBVCA.
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About the Miami Beach Cultural Arts Council
The Cultural Arts Council (CAC) is an eleven-member council created in 1997 for the purpose of developing, coordinating and promoting the performing and visual arts in the City of Miami Beach. The CAC serves as arts advocates before governmental bodies, coordinates collective marketing initiatives for the local arts community and funds not-for-profit arts organizations. Since the program’s inception, the CAC has awarded approximately $18 million in cultural arts grants, supporting thousands of performances, exhibits, and other cultural activities in Miami Beach.
About the Miami Beach Visitor and Convention Authority
The MBVCA is a seven-member authority, appointed by the City of Miami Beach Commission, with the goal of encouraging, developing and promoting the image of Miami Beach locally, nationally and internationally as an outstanding tourist destination. To this end, the MBVCA strategically focuses its funding investments in a balanced manner, fostering outstanding existing programs, stimulating new activities, and encouraging partnerships. The MBVCA is committed to a careful, long-term plan for allocation of resources to help Miami Beach thrive as a destination with something for everyone.
Media Contact
For additional information, images and interview requests please contact:
Ben Demars
Blue Medium
T: +1 (212) 675-1800
