MIAMI BEACH — “Go Ahead and Jump”: so says the large-scale text painting by Joe Wardwell that greets visitors entering Pulse’s new beachside tent, and so does the fair’s 10th edition seem to embrace this spirit head on with a leap into fresh territory. This year marks both a geographic shift from the Ice House in Miami proper to midway up Miami Beach, and with it, a conceptual revamp courtesy of new director Helen Toomer, former director of the Collective Design Fair and founder of Manhattan’s now shuttered Toomer Labzda gallery — who was shopping the fair right alongside collectors at Thursday’s preview.
“I worked with Helen when she was the associate director of this fair back in the day, and I kept up with her program when she had her gallery, and I really wanted to support her,” said LA gallerist Walter Maciel, who had intended to move on from Pulse permanently before Toomer’s return and has now split his presentations this week between his solo booth at the fair for collage artist Tm Gratkowski and a mixed booth at Miami Project.
Notable changes to Pulse include a roster slimmed from more than 100 exhibitors in past years to its current 71, which features emerging — or “Impulse” — galleries like New York’s Junior Projects mixed in with veteran exhibitors. And though Pulse will host a special “Artists’ Morning” from 10 a.m. to noon on Friday, a number of featured artists were already present on Thursday. Susie Ganch stood alongside her flowing, geometric work revealed up close to be made from Starbucks lids at Sienna Patti Contemporary, while David Magnusson elucidated the story behind his muted father-daughter portraits documenting participants in conservative Christian “Purity Balls.” “I wanted to photograph a series of portraits meant to be so beautiful that the girls and their dads themselves could be proud of the pictures in the same way that they were proud of their decisions,” he explained, remarking that his own initial attitudes toward the abstinence-based ritual began to unexpectedly change the more he delved into the project.
Photography is not in short supply at the fair, making up an estimated 25 percent of works shown. At Berlin’s Wagner+Partner, the turned backs of wan figures in Erwin Olaf’s “Keyhole Series” sit juxtaposed to Ruud van Empel’s lush head-on portraits. Meanwhile, Tokyo’s MA2 Gallery turned its booth into a black box, the better to show Ken Matsubara’s pairings of archival photos from Coney Island with his video works shot in the same location in present day.
Perhaps owing to Toomer’s onetime home turf, the fair has a strong New York showing, with 18 of the exhibitors venturing down from the Big Apple. Winkleman Gallery, for example, delivered another New York before-and-after with Jennifer Dalton’s wall-spanning grid of photographs documenting change in Williamsburg buildings. And even at Boston’s Miller Yezerski Gallery, Nathalie Miebach’s bright, whimsical multimedia sculptures used data from New York’s weather patterns to visualize the wreckage of amusement park rides resulting from Hurricane Sandy — one of which, 2014’s “The Wavy Jane,” sold fast for an undisclosed price.
Alongside all of the artist-driven fare was some good old tongue-in-cheek art world commentary, none more blatant than the solo booth of Lisa Levy’s text paintings at Schroeder Romero, sporting phrases like “Welcome to the home of one truly smart, sexy art collector” and “You probably could have made this, but you didn’t” in a simple white sans serif. Meanwhile, over at Davidson Contemporary sits “The Center of Convention,” a dizzying installation by duo Ghost of a Dream made up entirely of debris collected in the wake of art fairs — signs, carpeting, crates, and various shades of blue tape patterned into diagonals — meant to convey the “energy of overstimulation” that so often saturates fairs like Basel, Frieze, and the Armory Show, according to co-creator Adam Eckstrom. “I think it’s one of the most overwhelming things as you walk around an art fair — everything’s catching your eyes and competing for attention,” agreed co-creator Lauren Was. And indeed, this fresh edition of Pulse is no exception.
