For this project, Art Assets was hired by HFZ Capital Properties to curate an art program for the marketing office of HFZ’s new residential property, 11 Beach Street.
The selected artists offered a modern, sophisticated point of view that reflected the decor and tenancy of 11 Beach.
Graham Caldwell
Graham Caldwell was born in Philadelphia, in 1973, and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He received a BFA in Glass from
the Rhode Island School of Design in 1998. He has exhibited widely throughout the US in solo and group shows in New York City; Washington D.C., San Diego, Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, and Miami, as well as in Istanbul, Turkey, Prague, and the Czech Republic.
Caldwell uses glass as a medium because of its historical and intrinsic association with the act of looking, from the early lenses that allowed glimpses into the microscopic world, to the eyeglasses, ubiquitous windows, and mirrors inside telescopes that allow humankind to peer into space. Much of his work is based on imperfect, interconnected organic systems that take the form of bone, plant tendrils, or blood vessels being gently pulled by gravity.
Fanny Allié
Fanny Allié was born in 1981 in France and currently lives and works in New York City. She obtained a master’s degree from the National Superior School of Photography in Arles, France and has exhibited in the US, Belgium, France, Germany, Spain, and Mexico.
Allié is a multidisciplinary artist working in sculpture, installation, drawing, and more recently painting. The human figure, with a particular interest in its outline, is at the core of her practice, which explores the relationship to our own body, places, and memories. In a series of recent public works, mostly done using neon, she has focused on the human body and its silhouette. By removing the center of the figure, the artist plays with ideas of memory and the mark we leave on places and others. The work shows traces of a fleeting moment, an ephemeral existence, and, most of all, a narrative that links us to each other in our daily life.
Rachel Mica Weiss
Rachel Mica Weiss was born in Rockville, Maryland. She received her B.A. in psychology from Oberlin College in 2008 and her M.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2012. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She has exhibited her work in New York City, San Francisco, and Philadelphia.
Weiss plays upon the slippery connotations of the organic forms she employs and their relationships to the human body to create relatable scenes in which one’s body—any body—can be inserted. She has created multiple architectural interventions similar to the one presented here using yards of gleaming tencel thread. The artist’s installations always respond to the specificity of the environment for which they are created, finding significance in the interplay between physical and psychological spaces, between inhabitation and inhibition. As the viewer navigates through the space, the threads shift, casting shadows onto the wall’s threaded bars of light and opening a new world beyond this threshold.
John Powell
Born in Los Angeles, John Powell moved to Boston, where he lives and works, in the 1980s. He received an MFA from Mass Art in 1984. In 1986, he was appointed as Otto Piene’s teaching assistant at the MIT Lab. Powell participated in a number of Center projects in France, Germany, Denmark, and Finland. In 1993, John started Light Time in Space, Inc. to investigate the development of public art based on the idea that light can be made an exciting part of public projects. Recent projects include the Northern Avenue Bridge in Boston, Emerson College, the Innovation Lab at Harvard Business School, and a tribute to Otto Piene in Berlin.
To complement his large-scale work, Powell creates small-scale light sculptures. He combines lights with carefully fabricated metal objects—using the same techniques used in exterior architectural pieces—to create a hypnotic rhythm of shadow and light. Text is an important aspect of many of these works: In this sculpture, the artist used excerpts of poetry by authors Richard Wright, Jorge Luis Borges, and Federico Garcia Lorca.