NADA Miami Press Release

NADA Miami 2024 Presentation

Joel Parsons // Clare Torina

Sheet Cake Gallery is pleased to share more information about the gallery’s participation in the 22nd edition of NADA Miami, to be held Tuesday, December 3rd through Saturday, December 7th at Ice Palace Studios. Sheet Cake will present a solo exhibition in the Project Spaces of new work by Joel Parsons, and an outdoor sculpture on the Ice Palace Studio grounds by Clare Torina. 

Joel Parsons is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice centers queer intimacy, anxieties, and pleasure. Dance, roses, and tears are consistent throughlines in his work, evoking celebration, longing, protest, performance, and humor at different turns. His recent body of work exists within a space he calls a “Speculative Dance Club for We Who Feel Otherwise in a World on Fire”. In this space, Parsons exorcizes frustrations and desires stemming from fraught means of information (and misinformation) sharing, pandemic isolation, and oppressive systems and politics. The dance floor becomes a place to experience freedom and joy, and cast protection over friends and loved ones. Grids organize and create order, but often fall apart or fail, underscoring the futility of making sense of this world. 

Parsons’ presentation for NADA Miami expands the “Speculative Dance Club” and introduces a new series of stained glass works which serve to frame and define the space that he is creating, adding a lustrous quality to the work and elevating the images and found and created materials embedded within them. The work collectively features his technically precise drawing style, artist-made frames, bursts of hot color, and lumpy and abstracted bodies intertwining and coming apart. A statement from Parsons reads:

In the ecstatic architecture of smoke and light, in swirls of mylar confetti and sprays of sweat and champagne, in love and in lust, we writhe and grind against the too-rational grid of the light-up disco dancefloor. We discover the limits and possibilities of our bodies through the pressure of bodies dancing with and against us, desire made flesh. We understand each other corporeally, partaking in a knowledge embodied and shared freely on the dancefloors of the Stonewall Inn and Pulse Nightclub and my local gay bar.
I chase after the exponential multiplication of energy and selves that happens on those dancefloors, the intertwining and the leaving, the assembling and the falling apart, the throb and the ache. I catch a glimpse of rapture, a spark of connection, a moment of longing, then distill it and freeze it in fragile glass. In this club, in this work, earnest and embarrassingly romantic roses are kissed by shafts of theatrical light. Thorns become tears, and tears become sweat as we dance in the hope of finding new ways of knowing and being known, beholding and being held, loving and being loved - a horizon for us to dance toward, together. 

Clare Torina is also a multidisciplinary artist working between painting, sculpture and installation in which she explores a series of personal fascinations including objects of worship, physical comedy, regional distinctions and mass production. Torina’s work often reimagines familiar subjects through scale shifts and trompe l’oeil techniques. Her sculptures in particular build upon universally recognizable subjects, each altered in ways that ask us to consider its form, production, and symbolic presence. Torina investigates novelty, idolatry and manufacturing.

For NADA Miami, Torina has created a 1:14 scale beaded jump rope presented to evoke the sense that it has just been cast down from use, spanning 125 feet from end to end. In this installation, the jump rope doubles as an index, or legend, for the meeting of two color palettes. A series of colors matched to Leonard Horowitz's Miami Deco color palette (1976) alternate and blend with a chronology of room colors from Torina’s nomadic history, each corresponding to a noted physical location. As an adaptable object made with home building materials, l-e-g-e-n-d  is a record of lived-in spaces, and an exercise on sentimental potency of color through the most basic act of painting.

This chronology of colors is a record of when I was first permitted to paint a room, and then my room, followed by a whole house, many gallery walls and then other places of work over the years. Good rooms and bad rooms. Invoking that feeling of choosing one amid an infinite selection and then living in it and it living with me forever when we left 6 months later.