Audio By Carbonatix
The old Miami Herald building is being demolished, while across the causeway, construction at Museum Park and towering condos near the American Airlines Arena have brought the boom cranes back to the shores of Biscayne Bay.
The skeletal armatures of the mammoth cranes dotting the horizon appear not unlike prehistoric creatures foraging on the landscape. For Matt Herget, the mechanical behemoths silhouetted against the Magic City’s skyline have become the inspiration behind a recent body of work.
The local artist, whose creative nom de guerre is Mr. Herget, combines elements of machinery and South Florida’s flora and fauna to create a weird vision of humanity’s uneasy relationship with the environment he says echoes from the dawn of time.
“If you trace art back far enough, eventually you’ll just have someone picking up some sort of tool and etching what they see onto the side of a cave,” Mr. Herget observes. “Most of the time, it was animals, and as these cave painters developed, they even began bringing life in the form of motion to their drawings. I have an obsession with the energy that runs through everything on this planet, and I try to capture that energy in my work.”
You can catch Mr. Herget’s new solo exhibit, “We Are Kings,” at Gregg Shienbaum Fine Art (2239 NW Second Ave., Miami) beginning at 6 p.m. during the Second Saturday Art Walk this weekend, where the artist channels everything from prehistoric cave paintings to today’s kids going wild with a box of Crayola on the walls at home.
“In my eyes, the crayon is the most primitive contemporary art tool,” Mr. Herget says.
Tuesdays-Sundays. Starts: Aug. 9. Continues through Aug. 28, 2014
