[Courtney] Public art doesn't always have to be a big, loud, splashy thing.
It can just be the same kind of art that you would find inside of a gallery, but existing
in a public space.
I'm Courtney Lavine.
[Laura] I'm Laura Randall, and we're the curators of Commuter Biennial.
I think so much of what we're doing with the Commuter Biennial is both literally about
people who commute throughout Miami, either for work, but also people who commute to see
art, that there is sort of this travel component that exists that's not always easy and accessible.
How do we activate these little pockets?
So, thinking about places like Hialeah Gardens, where so many people live, or commute all
the way from Homestead.
Let's activate these places that need more visual arts.
I also think a lot of what motivated some of the decisions for what was gonna be included
in the show revolved around having works that really were site specific.
Like Lily Martina Lee.
She does a lot of work that is inspired by various elements of true crime and, in particular,
unidentified cold cases.
She found locations where bodies had been found throughout Miami-Dade, and so that was
a way to sort of make it very specific to Miami, and sort of unpacking the individual
details about that specific case.
With someone like, let's say, Nice 'n Easy, who is the artist duo.
We looked for locations for billboards that were heavily congested with traffic.
They created two billboards, each that have somewhat slightly suggestive imaging, and
it says, to enhance your drive, call IMEASY2.
And I think most people's kneejerk reaction to that is that it might be a hotline for
something that might be a little seedy, and you call the number, and there's this bait
and switch element, because you call, and you're directed to a recorded message that's
actually a mindfulness meditation.
[Phone] We're Nice 'n Easy.
You can be nice 'n easy too.
[Courtney] And one that's specifically geared towards calming ourselves and centering ourselves
and sort of letting go of tension while we're driving in our car.
[Phone] Please keep your eyes on the road throughout this brief meditation.
Juan Landaverde, he's an interesting artist to commission, because most all of his work
has to be site-specific.
In this case, he was looking at the way urban sprawl has reached Homestead, so people living
there now aren't necessarily working in agriculture, right?
So they're commuting to downtown Miami, and how does that change the landscape?
It's also a really beautiful, interesting piece.
You have this contrast of this bare field around it, minimal but highly effective.
Virginia Overton down in Palmetto Bay, so she's an artist who...
I worked at Socrates Sculpture Park, where she had this work called Untitled Late Bloomer,
and it was really important that we get that piece in the show.
It has a lot of Florida-native aquatic plants in it, so this iteration of this sculpture
is unique to South Florida in that way.
It does have a bit of that post-nature feel, but also sort of like, what will happen when
we're gone, as natural elements sort of grow back into things, and I think that's something
you might get a sense of with David's work as it develops as well, this sort of, this
link between the natural and the manmade environments, and that the natural environment is always
there, and it's always going to be there.
These are people not really intending to be going to an art museum or an art gallery,
they're just trying to get to work, or get home.
I'm David Brooks, and I'm working on a project for the Commuter Biennial, and the project
that I'm working on is called Studs and Bycatch.
So we have this house-like structure, very identifiable.
It won't be clad with sheetrock or anything, it's just the metal structure.
And then we have a series of taxidermied fish forms, which are all found in the local waters
here.
As this structure is kind of sliding off of the pontoon barge and looks like it's sinking,
it's gonna be situated in the middle of the Blue Lagoon, floating.
As it's kind of sinking, there's a swarm of fish, or a school of fish, kind of writhing
through it.
Which, it's a little bit ambiguous, as if the structure is sliding down and the fish
are gonna be taken down with it, or, if the fish are really thriving, and kind of being
held up in a kind of abeyance, or in kind of a celebratory state, like a trophy fish.
And so that ambiguity is important for me, so it's not just a kind of hitting one on
the nose, of like, man bad, nature good, but actually, it's much more complicated than
that, and it's neither of those things, it's just our reality.
So really, the only place you'd be able to see it is if you're speeding by on the 836.
That was one of the challenges, that it's not people that are purposely going to go
look at art, so it's kind of the unknowing art viewer, the involuntary art viewer.
Also, they might be stuck in rush hour traffic and stopped, but they also might be speeding
by at 70 miles an hour.
How do you create a gesture that can only be seen from a car, from the highway, that
both could tell a story in a matter of three seconds, or be a kind of roadside attraction
that kind of makes a person think a little bit twice about what's going on?
Having done works before in the public realm, where people really are not intending to have
to engage in artwork, sometimes, for me, in the past, it's been the most fruitful of them
all, 'cause it really lets people have a window of opportunity they would have never thought
they would've had.
A lot of the things that we've done with this show are about making us more aware of the
spaces around us, and I think that this is just one of the most exciting ways that we're
going about doing that.