FACE ARENA. MARCH 24TH- APRIL 23RD

OPENING MARCH 24TH, 6-8 PM

CENTRAL FINE is pleased to present FACE ARENA, a group presentation by Rose Marie Cromwell, Carolina Cueva, Jeppe Lange, Betty McGhee, Najja Moon, and Jessica Wilson, curated by Betty McGhee.

The works presented each deal with an uncoupled body, establishing a conversation between clashing visibilities and ontological/gnoseological states. Rose Marie Cromwell and Betty McGhee use photography to create windows and mirrors, recording beginnings and endings, and what frames them.

Carolina Cueva and Najja Moon turn to sculpture as conductors and containers for the mind to transmit or inhabit. Jessica Wilson and Jeppe Lange work in tandem with CGI and AI to reflect new mediations, new exchanges, their videos being a surface/projection of something much more complex occurring beneath. The circuitry of our bodies, our power grids, and our networks autonomously churn away as we deal with two faces.

In Not Normally At Rest (2020), Jessica Wilson uses CGI to animate four psychoanalytic sessions conducted by a duplex wall outlet. Each session begins and ends with a quiet synthesizer rendition of Alice Deejay’s 1999 single “Better Off Alone,” always cycling back to the fundamental question of their dialectic. The top outlet plays the analyst, while the one beneath plays the analysand.[1] Each session presents a different anxiety that the analysand is experiencing: nightmares, horror, shame, and death. Wilson uses the outlet’s connection to the power source, the “grid” as it were, as its 'metaphor' opening up a space of infinite connections and collapsed boundaries. Haunted by surge protectors and plugs, the precarious little face is tormented by a vast network of cables, revealing the total chaos that lies beneath this everyday apparatus that seamlessly blends into the environment.

Interweaving Rose Marie Cromwell’s black-and-white series, Eclipse (2020) and A Geological Survey (2022 - present), an entanglement of psychological space and somatic reality emerges in a new sequence. Respectively documenting her postpartum experience and her homecoming to the American West, Cromwell peers from a precipice between being a mother and daughter, between fear and hope, watching them age and grow beside her.

The genre of family portraiture disarms the viewer, making us receptive, and more porous to the anxieties that undulate beneath the surface material. The Hammock (2023), a portrait of Cromwell’s mother, is a discomfiting view of vitality and mortality overlapping. This internal conflict quietly hums throughout her portraits, still life, and landscapes; Set against a barren desert, the abandoned Water Tank (2022) evokes as many existential threats as any other image: we notice it because it is not what it is supposed to be.

Betty McGhee’s self-portraits cut the density of the domestic space, inserting her gaze as an elusive yet demanding subject. My old friend and my old lady (2024) appears like a burning image, with confidential documents falling into a red glare. Between a desire to be witnessed and to erase herself entirely, she severs her body in the frame, cheating her face from the camera while a portion stares back through the monitor, dividing herself again as photographer and subject.

Rooted in the physical limits of immigration, Carolina Cueva’s sculptures posit a way for the mind and body to exist separately. The many faces of Muya (2022), which means garden in Quechua, spawn an image of a Hydra resisting the cauterizing effects of displacement. Eucalyptus leaves entwine themselves around the faces of grandmother, mother, and artist, forming new roots and leaves at the site of separation. Though the ceramic and adobe sculptures possess undeniable fullness, they are imbued with the artist’s desire to become nonsolid, her consciousness straining to reach out from the coastal wetlands of South Florida, back to the Andean Highlands.

Najja Moon’s Simulacrum of a Cycle (2021) is a mutable form. The wood panel leaning askew on the gallery walls creates a volume out of absence; its recesses form paths and boundaries, like a closed circuit waiting for voltage. Each opening produces a shadow, extending the panel into a shifting plane for light to sculpt, its dimensions open to new ideas of what it means to be complete.

For his 2020 video, ABYSS, Jeppe Lange uses artificial intelligence to create a chain of 10,000 images found on Google’s reverse image search. Beginning with an empty black frame, the video flickers through the internet’s massive image archive, overwhelming the viewer with over twelve images per second, finally arriving at a white frame thirteen minutes in. The total power of Artificial Intelligence relays a nascent, stumbling consciousness that struggles to calculate the human psyche. An intensifying score accompanies the odyssey of misunderstandings; with images sequenced exclusively on patterns and colors, the algorithm reveals itself incapable of relating to scale, context, or emotions.

Betty McGhee, Miami Beach, March, 2024

[1] The analysand is the person who undergoes psychoanalysis.

Rose Marie Cromwell (b. 1983, Sacramento; based in Miami) is a photo and video artist whose work explores the effects of globalization on the local as well as the tenuous space between the political and the spiritual. Her first book, El Libro Supremo de la Suerte, was published in 2018 by TIS books and was awarded the Light Work Photobook Prize and named one of the 25 Best Photobooks of 2018 by TIME magazine. In 2021, she published two books, Eclipse (TIS books) and A More Fluid Atmosphere (Pomegranate Press). She has had solo exhibitions at DiabloRosso and Antítesis, both in Panama City, Panama; Institute 193, Lexington, Kentucky; and Filter Photo, Chicago.

Her work has also been exhibited at Aperture Foundation, New York; High Museum, Atlanta; PRIZM Art Fair, Miami; TILT Institute for the Contemporary Image, Philadelphia; and the Silver Eye Center for Photography, Pittsburgh; among many others. Cromwell is the recipient of a Fulbright grant and a Getty Reportage grant, was a Light Work artist in residence, and was an artist in residence at Oolite Arts in Miami. Cromwell’s individual presentation, “A Geological Survey,” will take place at the ICA Miami, Miami, FL; from April 7 through October 27, 2024.

Carolina Cueva was born in Lima, Peru, and raised in Miami Beach, Florida. Working in sculpture, performance, and 2D works, Cueva follows an intuitive form of making, layering investigation, and invocation that deepens her connection to source. Cueva draws from her Quechua Indigeneity, Andean heritage, and her cross-cultural upbringing. In addition to her art practice, she has an extensive history working with museums, institutions, and non-profits as an educator and teaching artist throughout Miami-Dade County.

Selected group exhibitions include Photo L.A, Los Angeles, CA (2017); Port Angeles Fine Arts Center, Port Angeles, WA (2019); and Oolite Arts, Miami Beach, FL (2022). Selected performances include NADA Miami, Miami, FL (2018); and Doral Contemporary Art Museum, Doral, FL (2019), among others. Cueva has recently held a one-person exhibition at The Art and Culture Center, Hollywood, FL (2022). Cueva was awarded a Wavemaker Grant and an Artist Access Grant in 2021.

Jeppe Lange (b. 1987, Copenhagen) is a video artist and writer whose work revolves around memory and perception. Since 2019 he has been working with AI, utilizing it both as a filmmaking tool and as a subject of examination. He has written articles on AI for Danish newspapers and is currently writing a novel about photography and the end of the world. From 2012 - 2019, Lange completed his BFA & MFA at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig.

Selected group exhibitions include Photofair, Shanghai; B3 Biennale, Frankfurt; Thorvaldsens Museum; Fotografisk Center; Kunsthal Charlottenborg; and Institut Français du Danemark. Lange has been nominated in several photo and film festivals (Doc Alliance Award 2022, New:Vision Award 2022, Nordic Light Festival 2021) and in 2018 and 2023 he won Young Directors Awards at the Cannes Film Festival for his video pieces “Laws of Motion” and “Past.”

Betty McGhee (b. 1997, Miami, FL) is a Miami-based artist and curator. In 2019 McGhee received a BA in Art History from Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT. In 2022, she held a solo presentation at Diafano, Miami, FL. Selected group exhibitions include CENTRAL FINE, Miami Beach, FL; Locust Projects, Miami, FL; Arts Warehouse Delray, Delray, FL, among others. McGhee has curated exhibitions at CENTRAL FINE, Miami Beach, FL; and Piero Atchugarry Gallery, Miami, FL. From 2022 - 2023, McGhee co-hosted an arts panel and podcast, MÁS, with Yaneisy Reyes for Diafano, Miami, FL.

Najja Moon is a Miami-based artist and cultural practitioner, born and raised in Durham, North Carolina. Her visual arts practice uses drawing, text, and sound to explore the intersections of queer identity, the body and movement, black culture, and familiar relations both personal and communal. In 2008, Moon received a BA in Studio Art and Communications Studies from Pfeiffer University, Misenheimer, NC. Selected group exhibitions include MOCA, North Miami, FL; AIM Biennial, Miami, FL; Little Haiti Cultural Complex, Miami, FL; Villa du Parc Contemporary Art Center, Annemasse, France; San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, CA; Station Museum, Houston, TX; and Laband Art Gallery, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles, CA.

Jessica Wilson (b. 1991, NYC) makes computer-generated animations, installations, and 3D-rendered flat works with sensitivity to the somatic and material effects of phantasmal or virtual systems. In 2020 Wilson received an MFA from the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College, and is an artist in residence at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten; 2023-2025. Recent solo and group exhibitions include Tallinn Photomonth 23, Tallinn Estonia (2023), “Perfectly Clear” with Kai Matsumiya, Basel, Switzerland (2023), “The Painters New Tools” Nahmad Contemporary, New York (2022); “Under the Hood” Riga Technoculture Research Unit, Riga, Latvia (2022); “Screen Series: Jessica Wilson”, New Museum, New York (2020), “Not Normally at Rest,” Page (NYC), New York (2020); and “Faulty Bulb,” Crush Curatorial, New York (2019).

Her works have been included in screenings and film festivals including at Callie’s, Berlin (2023), International Film Festival, Rotterdam (2020); Global Anesthetics, Athens, Greece (2019); Art Metropole at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto, Canada (2019); and Pioneer Works, New York (2018).