FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

For an artistic encounter unlike anything else in Miami this season, New York’s gallery Jack the Pelican Presents has organized a temporary exhibition in a gutted bodega across from the Rubell Family Collection. “Grendel,” named for the ambiguous untamed monster of the Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf, uses the 5,000 feet of gritty space to its advantage.

Grendel Miami, an exhibition of "ambitious works of art that would be impossible to display in the confines of an art fair," opens at the Big Green Supermarket. This exhibition of ambitious works of art would be impossible to display in the confines of an art fair, but Grendel is the powerful beast in the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf. He is of the wilderness... untamed, ferocious and proud. And he is young. Maybe a wee bit rash.

“We recreated an old-school Williamsburg space,” explained Jack the Pelican Present’s Don Carroll. “This is raw, brutal, direct and yet incredibly friendly. We wanted to show art as big as it wants to be.” Dominating the main room of the show was a massive tree made of recycled clothing by the Miami artist collective, Guerra de la Paz, which Jack the Pelican Presents offset with Kelly Sturhahn’s hanging black sheets adorned with intricate cut-outs and glimmering mirrored ornaments. Similarly, New Orleans artist Shawn Major stitched talismans, plastic doll heads and glow-in-the-dark constellations into elaborate quilts. And Peter Caine’s “Cabana Boys” greeted visitors at the entrance with bobbing totems sheathed in colorful hosiery.

In a separate small room, another Williamsburg gallery, Dam, Stuhltrager, stationed Mark Esper’s kinetic light sculptures next to Loren Munk’s painted maps of the New York art world, then and now, which added a temporal and spatial perspective to the show.

Rupert Ravens Contemporary, which opens in Newark next spring, mounted an installation by Matthew Gosser that riffed on an abandoned Pabst brewery in the New Jersey city. In the space, furniture made from assembly-line machinery was flanked by photographs of the factory’s mangled remains and ephemera from its white- and blue-collar workers.

Even with so many memorable works, the overall effect of “Grendel” lingers more powerfully than any single element. As Carroll explained: “We created, using this collective energy, something that’s larger than any work.”

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about the artist: Guerra de la Paz is the composite name that represents the creative team efforts of Cuban-born artists, Alain Guerra and Neraldo de la Paz. What began as an idea for two individual artists to share a working studio in Miami's Little Haiti, has become an ongoing collaboration that has evolved into constant experimentation. The recipient of the 2008 SCOPE Foundation Grant for artist project “Under the Banyan Tree,” they are are represented in the Saatchi Collection (London), 21C Museum Foundation (Louisville, KY), Frost Art Museum (Miami, FL), Miami Art Museum (Miami, FL), and The Cintas Fellows Collection.

about the gallery: People go to Jack the Pelican Presents to see something the likes of which you have never seen before. The gallery, founded in 2002, discovers and nurtures local Brooklyn artists and others from around the world, who have not yet had the chance to expose their work in New York. One- or two-person shows lasting five weeks allow viewers to come to a fuller understanding of each artist’s unique vision.