Ice Palace Studios
1400 N Miami Ave
Miami, FL 33136
United States
The booth presents a dialog between Philip Mueller’s (b. 1988) paintings and Monika Grabuschnigg’s (b. 1987) sculptures.
Engaging in epistemology theories, in particular Plato's Allegory of the Cave and the Simulation Hypothesis, the works extend Grabuschnigg’s investigations into how we understand – or attempt to understand – human existence in our accelerated and increasingly hyperreal environment.
Grabuschnigg’s series Crash (Simulation), 2019, ceramic adaptation/translations of wheel hubs, will occupy the floor of the booth. The extreme-heat-deformed ceramic hub caps are related to the cars we know but act more as symbols, references to a hyper-optimised society, where human interaction grows increasingly attached and abstracted.
The works circles the questions of how we can navigate through our ever-more complex environments, in which boundaries between the real and virtual are fluid, aflame and melting.
One of the most important enclaves of Beach Resort Tiberio is Santo Stefano; a prison island in the Gulf of Gaeta in the Mediterranean Sea.The booth walls will be covered with a landscape of Mueller’s ongoing fictional Beach Resort Tiberio being the backdrop for its sub-series Autodromo di Castello d'oro (translated: The Golden Castle's driving circuit). Mueller’s representation of the car is an emblem for the period from which it originates, appealing to individuals enticed by the more hedonistic pleasures of life. Situations of the fictional characters are encapsulated within scenic stills of the resort, their forlorn portraits an extended detail of this apocalyptic and idyllic dreamscape.
Faded, graffiti-stained walls, tall, dense wilderness, iridescent pool hues and tattooed skin - all are fleeting, cinematic instances, all isolated moments of drawn out days of opulence, all glimpses of Mueller’s expansive anti-beach resort. In the minds of these individuals, detached from traditional restrictions, constraint does not exist; they roam the island, seeking, chasing, living and fulfilling a culture of excess and thoughtless, remorseless pleasure.
