Arts

A Dream Worth Catching at Praxis

What’s it like to walk through your dreams; or maybe your childhood memories, or fleeting moments of your past? It might be like walking in and around Teresa Diehl’s fabulous, contemplative installation

in the project room of Praxis International Art in Wynwood. “Maneem” is a maze made—really, painstakingly, achingly hand-crocheted—from fishing lines to form screens that hang from the ceiling. You pass around these chained screens, which are catching the light from the three, single-channel videos concurrently being projected. Depending on where you stand or how you are moving, the video images can be clearly defined, maybe of faces or trees; or opaque and vague. Like, indeed, a memory or a dream.

It’s a very quiet and moving experience. Diehl has played with this installation before (in New York City this summer at Governor’s Island for instance), and describes it like a Dream Catcher room, where the “woven webs only let good dreams filter through … the bad ones stay in the net, disappearing with the light of the day, and good ones pass through, getting embedded in the subconscious.” The flickering light, the real beauty of the delicate, hanging dream chains, the (intentionally) vaguely familiar visuals that are interrupted and repeated, create “visual echoes, some kind of déjà vu—and finally just suspended colors creating an ephemeral experience.”

This labyrinth of the mind is an excellent inaugural exhibit from the new director of Praxis, Julian Navarro, formerly at Bernice Steinbaum and the art gallery system of Miami-Dade who’s now returning from New York to ramp up the gallery with fresh, contemporary works from outside Miami but also from within. Diehl, who has studied and taught and exhibited in South Florida as well as elsewhere, will now be represented by Praxis. In the main space is a group painting show of Latin American artists, called “Super Cluster.” It also deals with spaces, though here mostly external, as in our landscapes devoured by man’s heavy handed and ugly interventions. It’s all well done, and raises expectations for more of this quality to come.

“Maneem” will be open through Jan. 15 at Praxis International Art, 2219 NW 2nd Ave., Wynwood; 305-573-2900; www.praxis-art.com.