The Body Is the Body

Lita Albuquerque, Bradley Bell, Brian Bellott, Isabella Brourman, Chris Cadaver, Claire Chambless, Jaxon Demme, Jacob Fenton, Artem Nanushyan, Paul McCarthy, Mila Rowyszyn, Ethan Shaw, Hannah Taurins, Alix Vernet, Jordan Wolfson

The Body is The Body, curated by Simon Brewer and Nathalie Martin, brings together an intergenerational, international group of artists working across painting, sculpture, and video within the historic Rice Hotel in Downtown Miami. The exhibition examines the body as material, as vessel, and as building, tracing how it both shapes and is shaped by the built and natural environment.

The Rice Hotel, dating to 1914, stood vacant for decades before artist Fared Manzur transformed it into his studio and project space. Rather than renovating it conventionally, Manzur preserved its original architecture, leaving exposed walls, high ceilings, and unaltered floor plans intact. The result is a rare environment that functions as part archive, part laboratory, where Miami’s layered past exists in conversation with contemporary work. The site’s weathered surfaces and timeworn presence animate a dialogue about the body’s capacity to mark and be marked, to inscribe itself into built and natural environments, and to hold traces that accumulate across physical, psychic, and historical registers. Works were conceived in direct response to this setting, using the hotel as a site where bodies and structures are mutually inscribed.

The show builds a focused dialogue around site, surface, and the histories embedded within both bodies and buildings. Works confront the body through its absence, indentation, and literal form; domestic fragments and empty chairs accentuate the absent body; cabinets and ceramics mimic corporal organs, repositories and vessels; geometric forms and domestic objects coalesce and render the body architecturally proportionate; devotional references and symbolic embellishments introduce a spiritual or speculative dimension to the body, leaving us with what can be sensed, felt, or intuited rather than directly perceived.

The Body is The Body functions as an arena for these artists to treat the figure as an unfolding process rather than a fixed object. Forms reveal themselves as if unearthed rather than simply installed. Materials appear shaped by time, pressure, or weathering, echoing the palimpsestic surfaces of the Rice Hotel itself. Some challenge the transgressive or hidden territories of embodiment and foreground the grotesque, the erotic, and the culturally taboo, insisting that the body cannot be separated from its libidinal limits or forbidden edges. Others approach that territory through intimacy rather than shock, transforming socially circumscribed parts of the body into inverted sites of beauty. Taken together, the works in The Body is The Body position the human form as a site of continual revision.