Friends from i.d. art Lab have invited us to present an exhibition at their space in Allappatah, Miami. Artmedia Gallery will stay temporarily there for several weeks and keep the program exhibit in its permanent location. 

The Stage Miami, the exhibition at i.d. art Lab, gathers works by Zachary Balber, G.A. Jakuvobics, Rainy Silvestre, and Mitya Trotsky. As the title indicates, Miami is the big stage for these photographers' artistic explorations. They all are distant from the stereotypical perception of Miami as a magical and paradisiacal city that functions as a shopping center and an oceanfront resort. They are also far from the labels conferred to Miami as a big inter-American business hub, the capital of the Americas, or many others closer to the marketing.  

Little Havana, an extended photographic essay by Rainy Silvestre, is simultaneously a tribute to this vicinity, an enthusiastic and warming approach to its current semblance, manners, and behaviors, as well as a confident use of the camera to create colorful direct images able to communicate perceptions, reflections, and emotions. Also, Little Havana is a visual concentration of levels of history and stories that cross the time and lives in the present.  

The photographs by G.A. Jakubovics in the exhibition are part of his body of work, Seeking a Code. At that moment an immigrant based in Miami recently, Jakubovics started to seek the city's code to improve and speed up his adaptation but found evidences of the implicit difficulties in pursuing this.     

In his series today is the day, Mitya Trotsky photographed the hastened demolition of houses and buildings mainly constructed from the 1950s to the 1970s in Miami, which is giving way to new properties. Even though no person appears inside the ruins he portrayed, these speak about people because they show many traces of human life, like a reminiscent inventory of a past time.  

Intimate Stranger, a multilayered series by Zachary Balber, can be seen as the artist's insertion into multiple contemporary social critical discourses on one side and his exploration of his life experiences on another. Rooms of luxury houses and apartments constructed in Miami are the set where he photographs his performances, which also become critical comments of the local real-state pornography.  

About the artists  

Rainy Silvestre has published his work in several online magazines and gained recognition with his series Little Havana.  

G.A. Jakubovics has practiced photography for a long time and presented two solo exhibitions.  

Mitya Trotsky has exhibited his artistic work from a young age and pursued a career as a photographer during the last decade.   

Zachary Balber has been a frequent presence in the Miami contemporary art circuit exhibition since he got his BFA in Creative Photography at the University of Florida, New World School of the Arts, in 2009.  

About the curator 
José Antonio Navarrete (Cuban-Venezuelan, based in Miami) is a critic, researcher, and independent art and visual culture curator. He is in charge of the ArtMedia curatorial program and participates in several international projects as a curator or writer contributor.  

About the gallery 
Artmedia Gallery was founded in 2012. Located in Little River, Miami, Florida, the gallery exhibits and promotes contemporary art based on photography and video practices. One of the gallery's central objectives is to explore the vast possibilities of the expanded notion of art through media technology.