On Thursday evening, January 15th, Shallow Depth: Seeing and Making Miami opened at the College of Architecture + The Arts | Miami Beach Urban Studios.
The exhibition includes work by Jason Chandler (Chair of the FIU Department of Architecture), Jacek J. Kolasinski (Chair of the FIU Department of Art + Art History), and Roberto Rovira (Chair of the FIU Department of Landscape Architecture + Environmental and Urban Design).
Shallow Depth drew more than 50 viewers that included students from the University of Kansas School of Architecture, Design & Planning. In attendance were also CARTA Dean’s Distinguished Fellow Alastair Gordon and Christian Larsen, Curator of The Wolfsonian-FIU.
Shallow Depth is the first collaboration of Jason Chandler, Jacek J. Kolasinski, and Roberto Rovira, an architect, an artist and a landscape architect, respectively. The exhibition collapses the disciplinary boundaries of these three educators to reveal the complexities of the city in which they live and work. For each of them, Miami is a context that frames and provides source material for their individual métiers. Miami’s surreal aura of geological flatness and precarious nature, mixed with the global ambition and subtropical context of a famously diverse city, enriches and challenges the work of this trio.
This collaboration reflects a long and sporadic conversation about how three individuals could make a shared exhibition that would be greater than the sum of its parts. The three represented disciplines are closely allied, and each participant is engaged in practice. Drawing, photography and the making of books and printed material were valued modes of representation.
Shallow Depth: Seeing and Making Miami will be on display until March 5th, 2015 at The College of Architecture + The Arts | Miami Beach Urban Studios: 420 Lincoln Road, Suite 440, Miami Beach, FL. Free and open to the public.
Jason Chandler, A.I.A., is an architect and an Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture at the College of Architecture + The Arts at Florida International University. Before teaching at FIU, he taught at the University of Miami and at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design for its Career Discovery Program. He was appointed chair of the Department of Architecture at FIU in the fall of 2013. Professor Chandler’s research has been supported by grants and fellowships from the National Institute for Architectural Education, the International Hurricane Center, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the Knight Foundation, the Cejas Family Foundation, the Metropolitan Center at FIU and the United States Department of Education. Chandler’s writing has been published in both national and regional ACSA proceedings and he has co-authored with Shahin Vassigh on Building Systems Integration for Enhanced Environmental Performance (2011). Chandler is the founder and principal of Chandler and Associates in South Miami, Florida. He is the architect of Plaza 57, a mixed-used building in downtown South Miami, as well as a series of infill warehouses in Miami. Chandler has received several distinctions in design competitions: Second Prize in the 81st Paris Prize Architectural Design Competition, Honorable Mention in the 2001 Scattered Housing Competition, First Prize in the 2004 Miami Beach Design Life Competition and Honorable Mention in the 2008 Dawntown Waterworks Competition. His built and unbuilt design work has received awards from the Miami and Florida chapters of the American Institute of Architects. Jason Chandler’s design work has been published by the Princeton Architectural Press, Trama, Florida/Caribbean Architect, and The Miami Herald and has been noted in the New York Times and the MIT Press. Chandler holds a Bachelor of Architecture from the College of Architecture, Art and Planning at Cornell University and a Master of Architecture from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University.
Jacek J. Kolasinski is a New-Media artist, Associate Professor of Visual Arts and the Chair of the Art and Art History Department at Florida International University. He came to the United States from Poland, where he studied history and philosophy at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in International Relations. Kolasinski received his MFA and BFA from Florida International University in Miami. Through his creative work, Kolasinski has tested complex video installations, single and multiple channel projections, as a well as site-specific projects in the context of public architecture. His art work has reached large international audiences through presentations and exhibitions in numerous venues including: the Teatro Colon, Buenos Aires, Argentina: Festival Internacional Cervantino, Guanajuato, Mexico; 61 Festival de Cannes – Short Film Corner; Cinema Politic, Barcelona, Spain; and Digital Fringe, Melbourne, Australia, to name a few. Most recently, his interest in “socially engaged academic performance art” has provoked several large-scale trans-disciplinary projects such as TAG (“The Art of Giving”) in Haiti and “Tree of Unity” in Liberty City. These projects are testing boundaries between art and the “aesthetics of philanthropy” by mobilizing a number of what he describes as social actors or archetypes — from cheerleaders and athletes to art students and younger school children – to bring attention to the marginalized communities ridden by serious societal problems.
Roberto Rovira is Chair of Landscape Architecture + Environmental and Urban Design at Florida International University (FIU) and principal of the interdisciplinary Studio Roberto Rovira, recognized for its creative approach in the fields of landscape architecture, public art, and design. He completed a Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering from Cornell University in 1990, and a Masters in Landscape Architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 1998, where he was Dean’s Scholar, recipient of the Award of Merit from the ASLA, and founder of the installation group Guerrilla Gardens. Roberto has lived in Latin America, Europe, and Japan and is a former U. S. Naval Officer, having served primarily in Asia and the Persian Gulf from 1990 to 1994. Roberto has been guest critic at Harvard, UC Berkeley, RISD, California College of the Arts, and the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya among others, and his research and creative work have been supported by grants from the Van Alen Institute, the US Department of Transportation, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, and the Community Foundation of Broward, to name a few. Roberto Rovira’s work has been published by Princeton Architectural Press, Routledge/Taylor-Francis, HarperCollins, Landscape Architecture Magazine, ACSA, CELA, Univision, the Miami Herald, Fairchild Tropical & Botanical Garden Magazine, Design Book Magazine, Curbed, Miami Today, South Florida Business Journal, Trama, El Nuevo Herald, and others. He was recognized by the American Institute of Architects as Landscape Architect of the Year in 2007, as one of FIU’s Top Scholars in 2009, and in over 10 open and public international competitions including First Place in the Miami Monument Competition in 2005 and an Award of Distinction at the San Francisco Botanical Garden Circle competition in 2009.
The Chairs would like to thank the following exhibition assistants: Martina Gonzalez, Ivan Torrenegra, Brennan Baxley, Esther Monterrey, Ludovico Ferro, Ricardo Lugo, and Joe Locke.
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