Brute Farce

In Pleasure, a girl scout crowned with a fur hat dangles a stem of grapes near her gob as the Soviet flag is hung behind her to dry on a rickety clothesline.

On an adjacent wall, Ahmed Gomez's The Red Menace fuses the golden age of pin-up posters with shades of Russian propaganda at the intersection of figuration and abstraction, where the paint barely floats on the canvases' surfaces.

Another eye-catching oil on canvas work is his Moscow No Longer Believes in Tears, in which a loosely modeled dame sits cross-legged in the center of the composition while the word Moscow is scrawled in Cyrillic lettering to the lower left.

Just as compelling a reason to make the trip to Westchester is video artist Natalia Benedetti's "You've got to trust space," part of Dr. Arturo Mosquera's Art @ Work project, in which the orthodontist showcases the work of local artists at his office in West Miami-Dade.

Near the office entrance, check out Perfume, a video piece in which a veil of mist detonates over what appears to be the bottom of a copper pot. As the fountain catches the light like a Fourth of July sparkler, the sweet scent of lavender from an atomizer freshens the air.

In Everything in Between, colorful grains of rice appear to magically fall from the sky atop a metal surface filling the screen and ricocheting off as they produce the sound of a tinny drum. The green, yellow, blue, and pink candylike bits fly about the screen like salmon swimming upstream until a hand appears to clear the mound in a clean sweep.

On a small DVD monitor tucked in the far lobby corner, The Sun and the Moon captures incandescent drops of water as they accumulate on a pane of glass. The light illuminating the rising steam from behind gives the impression of a canopy of stars under the night sky. Next to the monitor, the artist has drawn a pair of disembodied hands with graphite right onto the wall, which appears to hover in space in a prayerful pose.

For anyone who still believe that the further west one drives, the more of a cultural wasteland Miami becomes, these two offerings may convince you to shift gears.