RACHEL FEINSTEIN

Rachel Feinstein: The Miami Years spans almost three decades of work by the New York–based artist and is her first major exhibition in her hometown. Displaying Feinstein’s multidisciplinary approaches to sculpture—which have encompassed painting, video, performance and installation over the course of her career—The Miami Years reflects on themes of intimacy, vulnerability and abjection, exploring Feinstein’s examination of societal factors that shape human behavior and female identity.

Feinstein has often created enveloping environments that serve as exhibition scenography, at times incorporating wallpaper into her projects. The works in the exhibition showcase the artist’s recurring use of scenography, specifically the theatrical flat as a form that both exposes and reinforces the notion and structures of artifice and illusion. While early influences include figures like Carolee Schneemann and Kiki Smith, there is another powerful undercurrent in Feinstein’s work: Miami.

The artist grew up in the “Magic City” during the 1980s. Miami, then and now, is defined by the collision of extremes: lush landscapes of extraordinary natural beauty juxtaposed with commercial overdevelopment and industrialization, glittering façades adjacent to crumbling urban neglect, and clashing architectural styles found in any single block. Florida—as the terrain of winter sunshine, Disney World, Art Deco, and American kitsch—is enmeshed in escapist fantasy while simultaneously embroiled in the conflicted realities of contemporary life, politics and the environment.

Feinstein’s exhibition includes a new site-specific commission Panorama of Miami (2024), a massive installation of painted mirrored wall panels spanning thirty feet, where the artist prods the contradictory nature of Miami’s decadence and sophistication. Viewers will step into a representation of Miami’s lush jungle landscape where the wallpaper design is based on a patchwork of archival photographs and illustrations of iconic parks and foliage in the Miami region—from the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden and Vizcaya Museum and Gardens to the Venetian Pool on the lush grounds of the Biltmore Hotel.

With fragmentation echoing throughout Feinstein’s artmaking practices, The Miami Years is Feinstein’s first exhibition to consider the underlying impact of South Florida’s collective imagination and extreme realities on her rich and sweeping. The artist wields a spectrum of cultural, social, aesthetic and art historical references—from eighteenth-century rococo paintings by Fragonard, to fairytales and folklore, to fashion advertising and the cultural traces of Los Angeles. Exaggerated, incongruent, cobbled-together and sometimes monstrous, Feinstein assembles these disparate parts and pieces—be they human forms, architectural relics or theatrical settings—into cohesive, compelling works.