Hotel Croydon, 3720 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach, FL 33140
Dates of Exhibition: November 14, 2024 through December 12, 2024
Dennis Scholl is a visual artist and filmmaker based in Miami Beach. His studio practice focuses on acquiring objects of desire and reworking them using assemblage. He mines archival materials, creating unexpected entanglements between memory, artifact and conceptual drawing, while interrogating history. The artist uses source materials that reflect his own lived experience, while also accessing more divergent historical and popular cultural resources. His practice questions how we assign meaning and value to these objects and though it seems to conserve and resuscitate archival material, it also reimagines its very form.
His documentary films explore a mysterious ‘50s abstract painter, ’60s Soul music in Miami, the vanishing elderly Jewish population of Miami Beach in the ‘70s, a Cuban ballerina seeking freedom in the ‘90s and the greatest jazz singer of the 21st century.
His films have appeared in over one hundred film festivals, including Sundance, SXSW and DOC NYC, winning numerous awards. He has received twenty-three regional Emmys from the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. His film, The Last Resort, was acquired by Netflix. His latest documentary, Naked Ambition, tells the story of Miami’s world-renowned pinup photographer.
Artist Dennis Scholl’s work “Untitled (Dodecagon Drawing Grid), 2024” comes across as an obsessive drawing practice. Scholl is interested in the dodecagon 12-sided figure and uses it as an organizing principle in his practice. This presentation consists of up to 100 unique dodecagon drawings shown in a grid. The dodecagon reminds us of the hours on a clock, months in a year or signs of the zodiac — in essence the passage of time.
Photo credit: Monica McGivern