Knight Arts

Biscayne Boulevard is lined with countless sleazy motels, where cheap rooms go for hourly rates and bringing a black-light is probably a good precaution. These places are notorious for prostitution and other seedy underworld transpiring, but it’s the last place in the world you’d expect to see an art show.

Well…..what if?

That’s what a bunch of New World School of the Arts students asked themselves when last night when they put together a strange and spontaneous art show utilizing vacant rooms at the Shalimar Motel (paid for by the hour) for unorthodox exhibition space.

It was three New World students, Natalia Manrique, Autumn Casey, and Laura Duran who came together to organize the event. Beginning last Sunday in the afternoon, four rooms were checked out, and various artists (mostly New World students) worked until the next night at 8:00 p.m. filling the rooms with everything from installations, to drawings, to video work. This work was then on view to the public until 10 p.m. the same evening.

What resulted was a sort of impulsive the engagement with space, similar in spontaneity to the kind of quick and dirty sex that probably usually takes place in these rooms. Much of the work evoked a very clear-cut, cheap and lurid sexually charged visceral energy that served as commentary as well as exploration of the unusual space. In fact, the rooms themselves became such integral parts of the artwork that there was little separation between an individual work (or several individual works) and the space it occupied.

Here’s a peek at some of last night’s work:

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