SouthFlorida.com | City Link Magazine

This weekend's Art Basel Miami Beach will be so big that it will ooze out of the Miami Beach Convention Center and into the surrounding galleries, museums, nightclubs and cafés. The four-day bash, which will begin Thursday, will feature works by more than 1,500 artists and draw thousands of art lovers, collectors and people simply in search of a good party.

As happens every year, a host of gallery exhibitions, parties, movie screenings and similar events will piggyback Art Basel. One of the largest is Art Positions, an exhibition taking place inside 22 shipping containers used to transport exhibition walls to the convention center. Set up along the beach, Art Positions, also known as Container Village, was created so new galleries could exhibit emerging artists for less than the $50,000-and-up fees required to rent booths at the main event.

Sarah Gavlak, owner of a self-named gallery in West Palm Beach, visited Container Village last year and was impressed with the innovative fashion in which some galleries transformed their spaces. She recalls one container that had intentionally been smashed.

"The whole container was lying there flat," she explains, "just lying there. It was brilliant."

This weekend, Gavlak will transform from observer to participant, as her year-old gallery is the only one from South Florida selected to contribute to Art Positions. In her container, Gavlak will exhibit The Meaning of Flowers, a show of works by 39-year-old mixed-media artist Aleksandra Mir from Poland.

When Mir exhibited at Art Basel in Switzerland two years ago, she won a Baloise Art Prize for The Big Umbrella, a project in which she constructed an umbrella large enough to shelter 16 people, then traveled to various cities with it and documented her experiences in terms of weather, fellowship, solidarity and isolation. Mir's other projects have included Hello, an ongoing photographic series with a six-degrees-of-separation theme; The Church of Sharpie, which evolved from a monthlong Sharpie-drawing marathon in New York City's East Village; and The Biography of Donald Cappy, a book she wrote about a security guard and distributed to 5,000 people.

Five years ago, Mir and Gavlak conceived an idea that would become The Meaning of Flowers, the project Mir finally began working on last year in Sicily. The piece combines prints made by traditional letterpress with some made by potatoes and other vegetables to explore what Mir describes as "the romantic notion of love vs. the social realism of relationships that encompass everything from obsessive desire or confusion to betrayal and reconciliation."

"I really love the project Aleksandra's done," Gavlak raves. "I think it's beautiful and powerful and that people are going to enjoy it. I'm excited to get to show it to people."

Gavlak says she's also looking forward to experiencing the other exhibits inside Container Village, as well as the numerous Art Basel-affiliated and -unaffiliated events taking place throughout the city. These complementary happenings, she argues, set Art Basel Miami Beach apart from its parent fair in Switzerland.

"What's different about Miami is that there are so many other events happening," she says. "There are good collections to see in South Florida and all kinds of incredible film and lecture programs -- and tons of parties."

Art Positions will be open 2-10 p.m. Thursday through Saturday and 2-6 p.m. Sunday at Collins Park, between 21st and 22nd streets, on Miami Beach. Admission is free. Visit Artbasel.com. For more information on the Gavlak gallery and Aleksandra Mir, visit Gavlakprojects.com.