MIAMI, FL.- The Patricia & Phillip Frost Art Museum presents Florida Artists Series: Tori Arpad & Kate Kretz, on view at the museum June 3 through July 31, 2005. The opening reception will be held on Friday, June 17, 2005 from 8:00pm to 10:00pm at the Frost Art Museum in room PC 110, located on Florida International University’s University Park Campus at SW 107th Ave and SW 8th Street in Miami. The 2005 Florida Artists Series is a compelling exhibition featuring the work of two artists who confront ideas about the body from conceptual and visceral perspectives. Arpad’s multi-media installations and video works, titled confluence, explore the relationship between body and environment. Kretz’s exhibited work, Grace & Shame, includes paintings and mixed media textile creations that address psychological and emotional vulnerabilities in a post-modern context.

In Grace & Shame Kate Kretz boldly focuses on the investigation of vulnerability. Kretz asserts, “I believe that the function of art is to strip us bare, reminding us of the fragility we share with other humans across continents and centuries….I seek to evoke an emotional, rather than intellectual, response to my work.” Through her psychological clothing Kretz has created psychological states one could ‘wear’. Defense Mechanism Coat, a velvet-lined coat embroidered with the impression of veins on the interior and donned with 150 pounds of roofing nails on the exterior, is representative of her creative explorations in textiles and fashion. The artist remarks “Normally we use garments to construct an identity…I became interested in creating clothes which reveal psychological states, rather than camouflage them.” Accompanying these garment pieces are a series of bedpillows embroidered with Kretz’s own hair, and other three-dimensional objects such as Vagina Dentata Purse. In addition Grace & Shame features paintings including Crying Man Series, and Sanctum Series which also explore the topic of vulnerability. Jonathan Goodman, instructor at the Pratt Institute and the Parsons School of Design, and the catalogue essayist for Grace & Shame, remarks, “For Kretz, the examples of the feminine and the feminist coexist on the same plane – hence the raw quality of much of her art, which presents the audience with a language and a pose whose intense emotionalism investigates the more basic aspects of the female condition.” Kretz earned her Master of Fine Arts from the University of Georgia, and is currently an associate professor of art at Florida International University.

Tori Arpad’s concept behind confluence derives from the artist’s exploration of the hydrologic cycle and the transient relationship between earth and water in South Florida. The artist reflects, “The work is based on the belief that human beings aren’t separate from or opposite to nature, but rather that we are embedded within its cycles.” Arpad’s installation has several components. As visitors enter the space they encounter a shelf holding hand-bound books containing printed, transferred and drawn text and imagery on soft, white Japanese printmaking paper. The loose display encourages interaction and visitors are invited to sit on the stools placed below the bookshelf and peruse the books. A small postcard-size video is mounted on the wall showing a continuous hour of kayaking in the everglades. The audio features ambient sounds of the paddle as a human voice softly chants the mantra upon which the score to the main video is based. Entering the larger exhibition area of the room, visitors find 8,000 drinking glasses filled with water, set in front of large-scale video projections portraying eight vertical split screens. The screen columns feature close-up video imagery of water, earth, mangroves, light and a combination of these forms set to the tempo of an original cello score based on a Sanskrit chant, written by Juan Pablo Carreño and performed by Anna Callner. In the confluence catalogue essay, Guggenheim scholar, William L. Fox comments “Both environmentalism and installation art are individually their own kinds of confluence, modes of injury by definition and necessity bringing together multiple disciplines, scientific and aesthetic. confluence not only embodies the heritage of both, but is Arpad’s most complex and elaborate weaving together of her own techniques.” Arpad earned her Master of Fine Arts from the University of Arizona, and is currently an associate professor of art at Florida International University.