Turning down Audi packed highways, destination: another ambiguous hole in Miami, the chosen spot for a Thursday evening art colloquium. A friendly girl, guarding the entrance, charges a three-dollar admission fee while selling one-dollar handmade booklets featuring the night’s odd talent.
The booklet’s inner design is reminiscent of a “Volcom Stone clothing ad” (quote ’em: surfer Geoff Klug) filled with content enlivened by altered photographs, brief warped encounters with musicians Bobby Birdman and Jona Bechtolt (aka Y.A.C.H.T.), and artists like the TM Sisters and Gorilla Tactics, plus several valuable recipes and a nostalgic Mad Lib that’s like an Ernest movie without Ernest, Verne, or those two crazy cook guys that make really gross shit.
The first room is an ineffectual piece offering a red velvet carpet, an uncomfortable red smoking chair and Natural Ice cans strewn across the floor. Next is a room serving as a reception hall that leads to additional showcases and pieces.
On a sinister wall are black and white landscape-esque works resembling enlarged transparencies. To the dexterous right side we see smoke inspired cloud letters and rainbow sketches that hit you like The Care Bears Movie and fluffy puffs of ganja smoke.
These penciled clouds are posted outside of a room lined with cardboard boxes that celebrates the works of UM artist Matthew Chambers. Enter the 36 Chambers blah, walking into this veritable bum mansion more excited than RZA’s beats, to gaze at several contemporary pieces instilled with the emotions of males, aggressive pining for the opposite sex and stress.
When asked what he is trying to communicate via this menagerie, the persistently surprised Mr. Chambers states that is depicting his “reaction to personal naivet