SCOPE MIAMI 2023

BOOTH F17

December 4-10, 2023

Presenting works by

Caden Manson

Jemma Nelson

Claudia Doring Baez

Caden Manson 

Scope Miami 2023 

I have been shaped by my roles as a contemporary performance maker, installation artist, and curator. My endeavors, particularly with the company Big Art Group, have been driven by a passion to create radical queer narrative structures and to establish transitory generative critical spaces for both participants and audiences. 

At Scope Miami, I present a ceramic collection that is a natural extension of my diverse artistic practice. This collection mirrors the multi-layered, genre-traversing essence of my performance work, which has been showcased across 14 countries and over 50 cities in Europe, Asia, and North America. The hand-built ceramic vessels embody my exploration of radical narrative structures in a tangible form, using interference, slippage, and disruption strategies akin to my contemporary performance works. 

The vessels, while rooted in traditional forms, are canvases for a dynamic exploration of surface and texture. My approach to glazing is akin to the dense, layered nature of my performances, deliberately challenging and undermining the formal lines. This process is reflective of the themes prevalent in my work, such as queer embodiment and the construction of critical, transitory spaces. 

As a Foundation For Contemporary Art Fellow, Pew Fellow, and MacDowell Fellow, my work has been deeply interwoven with my performance work, presented by prestigious institutions like the Venice Biennale Teatro, Vienna Festival, Festival d’Automne à Paris, Hebbel Am Ufer, and others. My work, along with my collaborations with Jemma Nelson, has been a continuous exploration of the boundaries of performance, materiality, and site. 

In this collection, I've drawn deep inspiration from Theodore Roethke's evocative poem "In a Dark Time." Each piece is an artistic interpretation of the poem's rich imagery and profound themes. The titles of my works are direct lines from the poem. They encapsulate the essence of Roethke's exploration of darkness, light, and self-identity. Each vessel represents a verse, a metaphor, a moment of introspection. Like Roethke's poetry, they are at once deeply personal yet universally resonant, exploring the interplay between internal struggles and external realities. Through this collection, I aim to encapsulate the poetic journey of Roethke in this poem, translating his lyrical introspection into tangible forms. Each piece is in dialogue with the poem, an attempt to capture its essence in clay and glaze.

jemma nelson 

Scope Miami 2023 

Jemma is a find, an artists with serious bona fides (Venice Biennale Teatro, Castello di Rivoli, etc), but whose painting is new and rare to the market. This is a unique opportunity to snare hard-to-see and exclusive works. These are some of the first paintings to come on the market. Although best known for their performance, they were trained as a painter/printmaker, so this work is core practice for them.

An interesting aspect of these paintings are the uncommon medium: Japanese poster colors are an opaque, water-based matte medium best known as the paint used to color anime backgrounds, like the scenes in Studio Ghibli/Miyazaki movies. Related to gouache and tempera, professional poster colors come in a range of saturated hues; thinned out they can produce ink-like or watercolor like effects, or they can be layered and blended like acrylics or oils. These paintings are displayed in frames, but they are unvarnished and if you framed them differently you would see a beautiful matte surface (but of course they would be more vulnerable to the elements.) Jemma’s treatment and usage of the medium is unique and virtuosic— I don’t know any other artist at this level painting with these paints.

Jemma Nelson is a transdisciplinary artist known for their work with Big Art Group, a contemporary performance company they co-founded with Caden Manson in New York in 1999. Combining live video and complex choreography with a radical queer sensibility, their work brought them to the immediate attention of performance curators around the world; their performance work has been at the Venice Biennale Teatro 2022 (one of the rare American invitations to this festival), the Castello di Rivoli (an important contemporary arts museum and collection near Milan), the Festival d’Automne à Paris, the Wiener Festwochen and many other European venues. In the United States, their performance work has been shown at the Wexner Center for the Arts, the Walker Arts Center, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, PICA in Portland, and in New York at the Kitchen, PS122, the New Museum, and La Mama Gallery, among others. In their work for Big Art, Jemma composes sound, music, writes songs, authors text, and co-creates the performances with Caden Manson. They collaborated with Theo Kogan (of the Lunachicks, Theo & the Skyscrapers) and Sean Pierce (The Toilet Boys) to co-wrote and released a conceptual-album "The Sleep” which accompanied a live performance. Jemma also founded the band Tinkle and zine Old which played/was distributed at queer venues in New York in the 90s such as Squeezebox and Meow Mix. Contributors of the zine included Jose Muñoz, Nicole Eisenberg, AL Steiner (a band member); film directors Lisa Cholodenko and Kim Pierce were frequent audience members (fans?)

Jemma trained as a printmaker at Stanford University with visiting professor Larry Thomas, a queer indigenous artist who served as the dean and interim president of the Art Institute of San Francisco. Jemma then reconnected with Thomas in later years in Fort Bragg California and frequently visited his studio. As a painter Jemma frequently works on paper with watercolors, poster colors, gouache, and monotype, but he does produce oil paintings on wood panel as well. Art historical references in the work include “symbolist” artists Odilon Redon and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes; a contemporary touchstone might be the work of David Altmejd. Jemma’s images explore iguration both monstrous and human, cyclopean nudes and phantasmic contortions, albeit with a sly, playful, or biting humor. The paintings at Scope 23 Miami represent an intersection of thematic interests. Hodopodo (poster color on paper, 18x24, 2023) floats into the frame of the painting like a vivid hallucination. The form oscillates between balloon and ghost, eyes and smile melting across the surface. It brings to mind Redon’s The Eye like a Strange Balloon Mounts toward Infinity), but distorted, deflated, and rendered in lurid hues colors are a medium used to render backgrounds in Japanese anime like the works of Studio Ghibli. The Grand Phantoms and Phasmaphobias present ghostly bodies still welded tenaciously to their rude flesh. The paintings investigate materiality, form and figuration; calligraphic body hair anchors skin with an uncomfortably proximity even while the spectral remnants melt into wisps and drips of paint. The apparitions twist according to a logic that defies or denies anatomical rules, torsos facing asses, eyes staring into spreads and holes. The Cyclops bring to mind Redon’s The Cyclops but also Puvis’s mythological reveries such as Work and Pity as the figures frolic within fable-like landscapes. Altmejd’s Giant also comes to mind, but these cyclops cavort like the acrobats and athletes of Eugèn Jansson.