Rachel Feinstein in Miami: the collision of extremes that outline her hometown

It’s very emotional for me to have a present in Miami,’ says Rachel Feinstein, talking on the eve of her main new exhibition at The Bass Museum of Artwork. Spanning virtually three a long time of labor by the Miami-raised, New York-based artist, the retrospective – the primary in her hometown – celebrates and questions society’s embrace of artifice, significantly prescient when contemplating Miami’s popularity for decadence. ‘It’s bought these loopy extremes, between good and evil, darkish and light-weight, female and male, and it’s all been very unconsciously essential to me,’ she says. ‘After which, as I’ve gotten older, I’ve finished quite a lot of work on dream remedy and it’s grow to be extra essential. So Miami is the important thing to all of that, the idea of every thing I do.’

These extremes invite the conflict of the up to date and the classical that Feinstein weaves into her work. All through her profession, she has drawn on a various canon of artwork and cultural historical past, in works that merge the theatrical, historic and stylish, impressed by eclectic references from Franz Anton Bustelli’s commedia dell’arte collectible figurines to the weird fairytales of Hans Christian Andersen.

Whereas her large-scale sculptures and huge panoramas are rife with historic rococo and gothic references, the topic is usually up to date. As is the case in her new site-specific piece for the present, Panorama of Miami, which counts amongst its real-life references the smoothie stand at Miami’s Parrot Jungle, a preferred hangout from Feinstein’s childhood. Now not there, it lives on as a transparent delineator of the previous within the work, a 30ft-long set up of painted mirrored wall panels, which interlaces Miami’s tropical panorama with illustrations and archival images in a grotesque translation of Miami decadence. ‘We’ve got a unique thought now that the extra rich you’re, the extra minimal you’re. I discovered that in Miami that doesn’t maintain true. Wealth is proven on this excessive, most approach. And I discover that basically fascinating.’ Feinstein has deconstructed these fantastical parts in her work earlier than, notably utilizing the panorama format in her rethinking of the classical Sixteenth-century Italian custom of portray on mirrors. Whereas prior to now she has explored New York and Rome by means of this medium, her consideration of Miami right here is afforded a private depth.

‘It’s not a fantasy in the identical approach as Rome, the place I’ve been a number of occasions however by no means lived. If you viscerally know the sensation of a spot, it feels totally different than one thing you simply see {a photograph} of. You wish to get it proper and, in a approach, that grew to become a little bit of an issue for me. It took so much longer than I anticipated, and it was heartbreaking in some methods, too. Miami is a really totally different place than it was once I was a baby. Lots of the locations in my portray don’t exist anymore, or not in the way in which they did once I was a child.’