CURRENT  ︎
UPCOMING
PAST

NINA SUREL
LESLIE GABALDON
CHRISTINA PETTERSSON
A SUM OF POSSIBILITIES

June 4    —  August 4, 2022

Dot Fiftyone Gallery is delighted to announce the exhibition “A Sum of Possibilities”, a group show featuring Miami-based artists Leslie Gabaldón, Christina Pettersson and Nina Surel, curated by Verónica Flom.

What lies behind the merely visible? What is the memory hidden in the landscape, in the trees, in our bodies? The works of Leslie Gabaldón, Christina Pettersson and Nina Surel revolve around these questions. Using photography, sculpture, or drawing, they explore and produce those zones of silence, encounter, and transformation.

Leslie Gabaldón conducts a field research study on the forest, which is focused both on the environment and the introspective. Her series of photographs titled Locus has been made over the past 6 years at the same exact location in Florida: Gulf Hammock. Her photographs call for a reflection on the passage of time, nature, and our perception of them. In these images, the gaze of the artist appears walking, taking visual notes, keeping a log of a journey through time. It is as if she were an archaeologist of a lost world. There is a real thrill at the immensity of the landscape. But at the same time, that landscape contrasts with the permanence on our current more digital world and the tangibility of the things that we have let escape.

Christina Pettersson's recent series of drawings, Memory Palaces of Florida, bear witness to sites she considers sacred in her home state.  She speculates on how landscapes, in particular trees, plants and birds can act as living artifacts of our history, providing a unique opportunity to access multitudes of human drama and geological events, as well as more intimate details of the past.  Through delicate line we see the grandeur of Fairchild Oak, the oldest tree in Florida at over 400 years old, located within Bulow Creek State Park, once part of a slave plantation.  Or a particularly hallowed grove at Kissimmee Prairie State Park, where the last living Carolina Parakeet (our only native parrot species in North America) was shot in 1904.  Questioning the myth of Florida as a young place, her drawings reckon with how beautiful places often resonate with a brutal past.

Nina Surel goes in search of the most essential, the innermost layer. Surel subtly works around the relationship between nature and time. Core, her ceramic sculptures, revisit two previous works by the artist (the performance The Rite of the Womb and the video installation Grávida, both of 2019) to produce a set of individually molded pieces on the pelvis of a group of women. In this way, the result is as relevant as the intimate process of its production. The unique shape of each body is secretly registered, while at the same time it evokes the permanence of the origin, the persistence of life. These totems are not only a symbol of resistance and appreciation towards womanhood, but also a recognition of the legacy of our female ancestors, the mothers and grandmothers who preceded us.

“A Sum of Possibilities” posits geographies that invite a reflection on what lies behind what is seen, thus opening infinite perspectives for Florida and beyond.

About the artists:

Leslie Gabaldon was born in Venezuela and lives in Miami, Florida. Part of the thriving community of Latinx artists in the US, she has focused her attention on new media. Her tendencies toward alternative mediums eventually led her to embrace photography as the foundation of her work. Gabaldon's ideas stem from concepts of sociological memory and cross-cultural topics in the contemporary world, including life, sustainability, and climate change. Her photography practice is at the intersection of our natural landscape and the increasingly dominating digital realm in which we exist. Gabaldon is searching to recover our connection with the tangible world, to better preserve it, and continue living in open air. Her habitual visits to discover the ever-changing landscape within the wetlands and the forests of Florida are depicted in her most recent body of work. Her career spans over 20 years, and her work has been exhibited internationally. Selected participations in Shanghai, Argentina, and Colombia, and at local venues, including the Naples Museum of Art, Coral Gables Museum, and numerous art fairs, as well as solo shows at Dot Fiftyone Gallery in Miami.

Christina Pettersson was born in Stockholm, Sweden and lives in Miami, Florida. Her large-scale drawings, videos, sculptural installations, and group performances focus on the history and environment of Florida. She is the recipient of a Knight Grant, Ellies Creator Award twice, Florida Cultural Consortium Fellowship thrice, and is a Fulbright Scholar, and has attended residencies such as Everglades National Park, the historic Deering Estate, The Studios of Key West, Yaddo and Ucross. She is in the collections of the Perez Art Museum Miami, Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami, Bass Museum of Art, Margulies Collection, and the Four Seasons Hotel, as well as nationally and internationally. She is the 2021-22 ARTSail artist in residence, a nomadic research-based residency, collaborating with Friends of the Everglades to create an illustrated compendium of urgent water issues in South Florida. Recent solo exhibitions in less traditional spaces like Everglades National Park and Miami International Airport reflect her lifelong passions and deep knowledge of her hometown and its complex ecosystems.

Nina Surel was born in Argentina, and lives in Miami, Florida. She is a multidisciplinary artist whose work can be described as never-ending research of the collective unconscious from a decidedly feminist point of view. From painting and collage in her early works until experimental performances and video-installations, Surel keeps finding different languages to place the body -her own and else’s- at the center for her practice. Surel studied Fashion Design at Universidad de Buenos Aires and Stage and Costume Design at the Arts Institute of Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires. In 2016, she founded The Collective 62, an artist-run space that works as a platform for the study and development of collective artistic projects. Surel’s work has been widely exhibited in galleries and institutions in the United States, Europe and Latin America, such as the Church of San Matteo in Lucca, Italy; the Museum of Latin American Art (MOLAA) in Long Beach, California; the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Miami; the International Airport of Miami; and the Boca Ratón Museum of Art in Florida. Her work is part of important private collections across the globe.