State of play

After working at three art galleries and with artists such as Elena Madden and Laura DiNello, Adela Holmes, a photographer living in Savannah, Ga., decided to look for a job in South Florida. "I feel like Miami is really up-and-coming in the art world, and since art is my passion," she says, "I thought this would be a fun place to be and a great place for work."

Adrian Pasieka, owner of Poland-based global business group Pressiton, apparently agreed with Holmes' assessment of the city. His company leased a 3,000-square-foot former furniture store in Miami's Design District to open an art gallery.

Holmes went online to look for a job in South Florida, found the want ad Pressiton placed 43 minutes earlier and is now director of Pressiton Art Gallery. The gallery opened two months ago in Miami, where despite a recession, the burgeoning art scene continues to attract artists and art dealers hungry for some of the action generated in part by Art Basel Miami Beach.

Even though Art Basel is six months away, Holmes has been getting down to business with exhibitions featuring contemporary paintings, mixed-media work and photography from national and international artists, many of whom have never exhibited in Miami. While the gallery's roster includes Madden, DiNello and other artists with whom Holmes has worked, she also has established working relationships with artists such as Barry Gross of Miami and Katherine Mann, an abstract painter whose solo exhibition, Madrigal, will open this week.

A 26-year-old painter from Baltimore who has presented solo shows in the Northeast and in Taiwan, Mann is excited about her first exhibition in South Florida. "I don't think I've shown anywhere south of Virginia, which is where I am now," says Mann during a residency at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts that offers three meals a day and a large studio in which to paint. "It's wonderful. It's in the Blue Ridge Mountains."

The setting is ideal for Mann, who is inspired by plants. To her, they symbolize landscapes, and she sees all her work as landscapes or portholes into them. "I really love plants, and right now I'm just surrounded," she observes. "I'm allergic, so it's a blessing and a curse. But being able to see the systems of nature … the reality always blows me away."

What doesn't blow Mann away are rules, at least when it comes to art and play, terms that are nearly interchangeable in her world. "I like to try to think of these pieces as based in play, like the fantasy play of childhood where you're allowed to let your imagination go free," she says of the works on view in Madrigal. "That's the heart and soul of being an artist."

Mann, who majored in child development in college, knows about the three stages of play, even if she has not achieved them all. "Infants are interested in touching things and putting things in their mouth and that's their idea of play," she explains. "The second stage is fantasy play, that kind of imagination where you pretend you're a princess in a tower or whatever, and the third is rule-based play, like chess or basketball where the rules are set out for you. I never really graduated to rule-based play. I still am not interested in it. I'm stuck in that imagination phase, and that's what I would do as a little kid. My brother and I would make these epic worlds out of our toys."

Mann's childhood was mostly spent abroad. "My father is an American diplomat," she explains, "so I spent from third to sixth grade in Taiwan."

Her family, she says, often would visit the local street markets. "They would give you wooden rings that were like doughnuts and on the ground would be all of these toys—cheap porcelain figurines, mostly animals," Mann recalls. "You had to throw the ring and have it encircle a toy and you'd get it. That was exclusively what we played with."

She's still playing, but now uses abstract language rather than porcelain figurines.

Her work also incorporates elements of history, microbiology, botany and Chinese ink painting.

"I'm half-Taiwanese and I would go back to Taiwan as a child and also during college and study under this teacher who taught the traditional way of handling the sumi ink brush," Mann explains. "That has really influenced the work in that those kinds of strokes show up in my work, and also in terms of composition. My whole idea about what I want a painting to be is really influenced by Chinese ink paintings because they're not a straightforward linear narrative, they're more like an atmospheric place you can climb into. When you look at these old Chinese scrolls, it feels as though you could just crawl around in the mountains and walk up and visit the waterfalls. … It's like a kind of journey."

Mann's own journey is reaping sweet rewards. Upon receiving an MFA in May from the Maryland Institute College of Art, the former Fulbright grant winner received a $10,000 Tobey Devan Lewis Fellowship, intended for students who show exceptional promise in painting, sculpture, film, video, mixed-media or performance art. Later this month, Mann will enter Blue Sky Dayton, an Ohio residency in which artists collaborate with youths to create public art. The program is designed to allow artists to produce more-ambitious work than they normally do.

Already, Mann's work is a hefty undertaking. "I'm most comfortable working in a large format, as in larger than a person," she says. "My thesis project was to create a 30-foot-long painting because all my work seeks to do a similar thing—to create a fantasy-immersive environment using an abstract language, but also elements from the real world, like symbols and botany and bird wings. But the size is what really makes it immersive and what I hope is able to suck the viewer in."

Holmes got sucked in simply by viewing Mann's work online. "The way she uses space is absolutely amazing," Holmes asserts. "That caught my eye and pulled me in immediately."

The gallery director asked Mann to ship "Dragons," a large oil-on-canvas, for a group show. "But as soon as I saw the piece," Holmes explains, "I said 'You've got a solo show, girl!'"

Madrigal will open Thursday and run through July 4 at Pressiton Art Gallery, 4100 N. Miami Ave., in Miami. An opening reception will take place 7-10 p.m. Saturday. Call 786-925-2930 or visit Pressitonart.com. Contact Colleen Dougher at cdougher@citylinkmagazine.com.