A brief dispatch from inside the whirlwind of Miami Art Week! It’s been a crazy, glimmering adventure so far, and exhibiting artwork at such a hub of the art world feels incredibly inspiring! Here is a little preview of 4 of the pieces from my series at Modern Eden. While they are first-come-first-serve at the fair, they are also available through the gallery online and you can see the full booth display and inquire about availability here: https://www.moderneden.com/collections/scope-miami-beach-2018
This piece was a very special collaboration with Roxanna. For many years, I’ve been sketching a figure dissolved by the wind, turning back into the the elements of the land. When Roxanna showed me a beautiful series of self-portraits she had created with that exact emotional resonance, I knew instantly that I wanted to adapt them into this piece. I had discovered the lupine valley in the background on a mad dash across New Zealand with Crystal Barbe. We drove 10 hours straight to reach the area where the flowers were in their fullest bloom, and wandering the endless expanse of violet, pink and ultramarine blossoms filled me with a color rush unlike any other. It’s impossible to truly capture such a dreamlike place, just as it’s impossible to hold onto the fleeting beauty of the flowers - like petals swept away on the wind.
Even before this year’s California wildfires, the thought of vast areas of our world going up in flame has weighed heavily on my mind. Last summer, I drove from Seattle to LA, stopping in many beautiful locations to find adventure, inspiration, and capture photographs to work from. By this spring, almost every place I visited has burned. Malibu was the most recent - I had one of the most transformative nights of my life during a star-filled summer evening along its shores, and it breaks my heart to think of the devastation now. It’s an ever growing threat in our increasingly warming world, and all I can hope is that through awareness and action, we can still hope to affect change.
This
shadow figure feels like a beautiful revenant, haunting the world she
used to love. During our epic Utah roadtrip this autumn, Roxanna and I
captured a brief Photo-reference for the image on the cliffs along
Highway 12 in Grand Escalante Staircase. This is one of the national
Monuments now open for drilling and resource extraction, so it too will
soon be an unrecognizable terra incognito.
Photos by Adam Wallacavage
For
now, I’m back into the adventure of Art Basel, exploring mansions
carved of coral and soaking up as much beautiful art as is possible in a
few short days! Follow along with the crazy ride and all of my outfits
on Instagram, and I’ll see you on the other side!
- R
