Dan Gluibizzi

MIAMI PROJECT 5 DELIVERS QUALITY OVER QUANTITY →

Set on the corner of Indian Creek Drive and 67th Street is the small and impressive Miami Project 5—the fifth edition Miami Project with 19 galleries produced by Art Market Productions and headed by Jeffrey Wainhause and Max Fishko.

Inside, we found a relaxing atmosphere full of diverse works, and were first drawn into the gaze of tanning ladies from Peter Mendenhall Gallery (California) and the submissive and subliminal messages within a work presented by Cardoza Fine Art (Houston). From there, we saw strokes of brilliance in Giant Summer and Giant Summer II by Jane La Farge Hamill, She Knows by Howard Fonda, and the newly famed piece that was recently published in The New York Times’ “Sunday Review” by Dan Gluibizzi titled Now Wait—all presented by FMLY (NYC). We were struck around the corner by a piece by Ti-Rock Moore appropriately titled Flint at Jonathan Ferrara Gallery (New Orleans). Showing discolored water pouring from a public water fountain, the piece, above its horrid stream of undrinkable water, showed the moving words “Colored People.”

At Hal Katzen Gallery (New York), we caught some large wall piece by Richard Serra and Alex Katz’s sculpture titled Chance of women holding half beach balls. Close by, Gary Snyder Fine Art (New York) showed several of Vivian Springford’s wonderful acrylic on canvas works, and around the bend, we got lost in the warps of Crystal Wagner’s Paroxysm Bloom II at Hashimoto Contemporary (California). From there, we caught ourselves smiling at the sweet California Bicycle by Mersuka Dopazo and Teresa Calderón and the glorious landscapes by Laurence Jones at Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery (New York). The two characters in Rob Matthews’ work at David Lusk Gallery(Nashville & Memphis) then had us questioning gender roles and multitasking abilities, and in Julian Lorber’s This Is How We Play Now at Nicole Longnecker Gallery had us dodging steel spikes in the art world dugout.

Taking shelter, the sweet washes in Mike Smalley’s oil and graphite on linen works had us back at ease, ready to take in a few of our final favorites on the way out: the gift shop’s THANK YOU TOTE, produced in San Francisco by Open-Editions and designed by artist Lauren DiCioccio—an effort to ban the single-use plastic shopping bags; unique pencils, prints, pins, erasers, and books by a variety of eclectic artists; and the newsstand—topped off with The Wall Street Journal, Miami Project 5’s special handout, and on the top left, our Whitewaller Miami art fair guide.

Obscura Magazine →

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The anonymity that people can retain in the digital world has given them courage to express themselves in a way that they would not have dared in real life. “The keyboard warriors”, as they call it, are those who make judgmental statements online, claiming on what they feel to be justice and righteousness. This has doubtlessly created interesting pools of dialogue, but it has also, inevitably, caused people to go hyperactive in the sharing of taboos, particularly, on the sharing of sexual materials which are provocative and at times outrageous to look at.

 

But as I see it, the truth always resides in the perspective of the perceiver, and artist Dan Gluibizzi has perceived such information as his gold mine. By taking full advantage of these pools, he has transformed them into his source of inspiration. Based in Portland, Gluibizzi is obsessed with Tumblr. As he told Juxtapoz, he sees these Tumblr users as being “wonderfully obsessive”, as they “meticulously organize digital scrapbooks of their favorite sub-genres of pornography. Many offer the widest range of poses and body types I have ever found.” This has allowed him to fully utilize the information age, and at the same time, exercise his analog creativity.

 

The reason why his works are not as challenging to look at as their sources might be, is not only because he renders them in a transparent-like texture, but also because he extracts these figures from their contextual forms, shifting them into pure subjects instead. He further enhances these images with intriguing colors in pastel. Even though some of the figures that he depicts are really interacting in “animalistic acts”, the details that he includes attract viewers, just like the sweet juices from a piece of bubble gum. His works allow people to visually ‘chew’ on them for a very long time, so that these lifeless depictions are given with more than just the connotations of promiscuity and physical desires.