Some of the most impressive photography work we saw at Photo Miami came from Dionisio Gonzalez, who deftly documents the architectural disarrangement of shanty towns in Sao Paolo, Brazil by piecing together photos of the shanty towns themselves with photos of modern, geometric architecture that blend the clean and modern with the grungy and scattered. The artistic result is a long, landscaped image that will at once please and confuse your eyes at they trace from one side to the other. Gonzalez is represented by Fiedler Contemporary in Koln, Germany– but otherwise, there is little information on the web about this uber-talented photographer and artist. The best link I found to a sampling of his work (besides Fiedler Contemporary’s site) is here.

I really need to give a nod for the ingenuity (not to mention the photographs) of Gregory Cohen– this weekend we viewed his mobile photography exhibit literally across the street from Pulse Miami, running out of a souped up U-Haul truck with lights and about half a dozen pieces affixed to the inside of the trucks walls. It made a lot of sense to pull a move like this; he received tons of foot traffic and didn’t have to pay the super-inflated booth prices the fairs were charging. I loved his Burma series, especially this one of young boys holding what appears to be an expensive Canon EOS camera– quite a rare sight!

Ivy is a coat rack for people who hate coat racks and wall art for people who hate coats. Inspired by the Frank Lloyd Wright quote; “A doctor can always bury his mistakes. An architect can only advise his client to plant ivy.” It’s functional and decorative at the same time, one ‘Ivy Bag’ contains 16 Y shaped ABS plastic pieces so you can connect and design a configuration that suits your needs or whims, screw them to the wall and you’re set.

I rarely equate Miami as a good shopping destination for men– a majority of shops here are standard ‘this could be any city USA’ chains. Minus the Barney’s Coop, which is basically the same in every city, I can honestly say the only shop I really enjoy spending time in is BASE on Lincoln Road. It has an excellent curated selection of accessories, books, music, footwear, men’s and women’s clothing, music toys and jewelry from local Miami designers. Although the in-store experience is leagues better than their online shop, you can still get a great feel for (and buy) a diversity of hand picked products from small must-have brands like Maharishi, Nice Clothing and more. If you make it to just one boutique in Miami, make it this one.

We hope you have been enjoying our ‘wrap-ups‘ of Art Basel Miami events we’ve been posting. The wrap-up format has its advantages– it allows us to bring a large amount and broad range of content to your attention all at once. The Art Basel fairs did, however, provide us with finds that we thought worth covering individually. For instance, I wanted one of these Snow Study V pieces we saw at the Photo Miami for myself as soon as I saw it in person. Doug & Mike Starn created this lamintated lamda digital c-print mounted to aluminum, but only made five of them. The process they used ingeniously draws out the detail of the snowflake to the viewer’s eye, allowing one to essentially see the coldness– or at least I thought so. They are available (or more likely at this point, ‘were available’) through Hackel Bury Fine Art Ltd. in London. I do reccommend, at the very least, that you track down some of this work at one of the Starns’ solo and group museum exhibitions, which will be going on throughout the U.S. and Europe in the coming months.