ART FAIRS & EVENTS

Art Basel Miami: Offbeat Highlights from the Fair Trail

By Margery Gordon
Published: December 13, 2006

In the Soil Suite at Aqua
   After an auspicious showing at Aqua last year in more modest quarters, the Seattle artist-run gallery Soil showcased the 11-year-old collective’s 22 members in a suite that had been painstakingly transformed with panels covering walls and windows to allow for maximum display area.
  Nicholas Nyland’s crafty color patterns on a fabric floor runner coated the entranceway beneath Isaac Layman’s photographic studies of quotidian domestic objects. Vaughn Bell played on the travails of Closet Travelers, with a site-specific installation in a large closet that playing footage shot out of airplanes.
  “It’s a more ambitious show than we had last year, with more space,” said artist Etsuko Ichikawa. The Tokyo native, who has worked in the Seattle studio of glass heavyweight Dale Chihuly, captures the ethereal beauty of fire with her haunting burn-marks on paper.
  In Noli Me Tangere, Susie J. Lee’s curved mound made from crystalline flocking lures the observer into a projected video of a finger pushing against the surface. (SOIL sent collectors interested in Lee down the hall to Seattle’s Lawrimore Project, which sold two from the edition of five at $3,400 apiece.)
  Much about the perceptive presentation can be owed to Seattle curator Jess Van Nostrand, who helped members choose which works to bring and was able to bring out connections across media. “It exemplifies the diversity of the membership of the gallery, while also presenting a cohesive voice,” Van Nostrand said.