Borrador del Nacimiento

Tentative title: “The Birth”

Characters:

· LOGOs

· Fe Cristiano

· Agosto Sevin Marco

· Lieutenant Anne Archer

Preface:

When walking into a 10 x 12 foot room within the center of the large cross that forms the New Miami Art Museum, you pass into a room could be pulled right out of a hospital. On the far right, is a hospital bed where a young woman is lovingly holding a bundled newborn. She is tenderly shouldered by a young man who is presumed to be her husband. They are each smiling and almost teary eyed as they gaze gently upon the miracle of new life.

The room is replete with all the artifacts of a real birth maternity ward. The bed is genuine. In fact the separator curtains, the linen, the mother’s gown and the medical equipment are all on loan from Miami General. The clothes of both parents (father’s attire, mother’s sweater on the rack, the baby’s swaddling blankets, etc.) are authentic also, donated to the artist, Sandra Esperanza, by a local couple who agreed to share their garments for the exhibit.

The only items that are not real are the figures themselves. They are made of a resin. All of the faux humans were manufactured by an artist using the latest and largest of a three-dimensional copier.

More strangely, all three protagonists are recreations of yet another art piece: a three dimensional holographic image from artist Eugene Sigmund, better known to the world by his moniker “Gene Hacker.”

Hacker’s original dimensional imaging of the couple and their child is just past the next door of the physical recreation of the Esperanza’s piece. Whereas her rendering builds a comforting and endearing scene, Hacker’s original is a disturbing juxtaposition. His work is devoid of any of the rich context. Instead, walking into a darkened room, visitors are confronted with a lighted hologram beyond a glass wall that only has a green glow and features only the couple and their baby, sans any of the furniture, room or even clothes.

The two pieces are designed to be a relational interplay. The physical room is meant to remind everyone of the extraordinary but ubiquitous miracle of humanity, whereas the original is a simply recognizable event, the latter is a stylized reminder of what really counts, the humans themselves.

Oddly, the epoxy flesh-colored protagonists in Esperanza’s version of the scene are more soothing despite the viewer’s knowledge that they are merely a modern statue. Although Hacker includes all of the rich details that present the fine details of human bodies, the missing setting is rather disturbing.

Hacker’s piece lingers on the mind’s meaningfulness, while Esperanza’s dwells on the full story. Despite the fact that resin figures are without the photographic quality of reality, their clay-like bodies are comforting as any child’s doll house figurines. Knowing they have true clothes from a real couple who had their firstborn only renders the recreation more humane, but have we been fooled?

Is this derivative art any better just because parts of reality are attached to it? After all, the figures themselves were never crafted by actual human hands. The clothes are likely all manufactured by machines, perhaps by robotic arms. The room cannot be the true setting where the birth occurred. Yet in our minds, it is the story we all share, the one we embrace and likely approve.

Hacker’s characters are also real humans, albeit actors. Stripped of the visible features of context, they appear like floating ghosts, ghastly apparitions of either a faulty or confused memory.

In this respect, Hacker goads us with the taunt: the people are what matter, but is just their presence enough? How would it have been any different if it was a photograph lacking detail, so ubiquitous an experience in social media.

We live in a an age where we crave the meaningfulness of our humanity through rich story telling that relates to our experience, and yet both of these pieces from the collection entitled The Enigma of the Figure are but two striking examples of how our sensibilities are challenged by both the subject and medium of today’s artists. The tools may have changed, the characters may still be false recreations and derivations of the truth, but need to write in meaningfulness is ever present.

The Enigma of the Figure

June 11, 2021 through May 31, 2022

New Miami Art Museum

2013 Coral Way

Miami, FL 33129

Outline:

· A murder of a popular artist has taken place in Miami during the 2022 Art Basel Festival. LOGOs (Logistical Output Gathering Operations) is an almost- artificial-intelligence supercomputer assigned to Lieutenant Anne Archer to determine who has killed popular artist known as Gene Hacker. Fe Cristiano, the curator of the an exhibition featuring Gene’s latest work, is implicated in the murder, while her boyfriend Agosto Sevin Marco desperately attempts to prove her innocence against the superior fact-finding capability of LOGOs and the enigmatic Lieutenant Archer.