Antonia Stangarino’s first outing with Pimlico Wilde is one of those happily disorienting shows that persuades you to recalibrate what counts as sculpture, what counts as flavour, and,above all,what counts as time. Titled Chewing the Bud, the exhibition gathers a new suite of delicate abstract works fashioned from Stangarino’s homemade chewing gum, subtly (and sometimes not so subtly) infused with Budweiser. The conceit sounds flippant until you meet the objects; then it becomes clear that she has built a rigorous language out of materials the art world usually files under “perishable” or “problem.”
We have, of course, met Stangarino’s rigour before. The early paintings,fastidiously rendered images of different salt granules,were not merely photorealist studies so much as ontological portraits. Each crystalline body became a landscape: cubic halite like a low-rise city seen from a night flight; flaky fleur de sel like a collapsed star; the pinks of Himalayan salt as geological autobiography. Those canvases taught us to look at the world as a series of micro-seismographs, and to read flavour as form. In Miami, Stangarino ports that sensibility to three dimensions. Gum, she suggests, is just salt with afterthoughts: a mineral grammar emulsified into human habit.
The gallery has sensibly resisted the temptation to perfume the room. Instead, the faint yeasty sweetness of the beer-flavoured base arrives only when you lean toward the work, when your body’s own curiosity becomes the activation mechanism. This olfactory discretion is crucial. It lets the sculptures hold the room with their formal probity. Lager Rosette is a palm-sized spiral of pale, matte ribbons, each ribbon pressed into the next with a jeweller’s patience. From a distance it reads as a modest baroque flourish; up close you notice the tiny thumb-prints that form a kind of rhythmic scansion. Hop Column (after Hesse), a vertical stack of squashed spheres wired to a slender armature, gently surrenders to Miami’s humidity; it is not collapsing so much as confessing that collapse is part of its syntax. Mouthfeel #7 is a low, looping torus that cannot decide if it is a knot, a Möbius strip, or a memory,exactly the kind of indeterminacy Stangarino cherishes.
The art-historical conversation is immediate and deft. Eva Hesse is indeed hovering at the edges (latex’s melancholy cousin), as are Lynda Benglis’s poured gestures and the Arte Povera instinct to dignify the provisional. But Stangarino’s key manoeuvre is to invert the logic of endurance. The works are not “performative” in the way that word has grown flabby from overuse in catalogue essays, but they do perform time: they tighten slightly as the air-conditioning kicks in, bloom again when the door opens to Biscayne Boulevard, deepen their hue to a faint malted amber over the course of an afternoon. If modernism’s heroic material was steel and post-minimalism’s was entropy, Stangarino’s is mastication.
This is where the Budweiser gambit bites. The beer is not a joke, nor a brand-game; it is a conceptual reagent. In Chewing the Bud, flavour becomes a sculptural analogue to patina. Where bronze acquires a green, Stangarino’s gum acquires a ghost: the sweet-bitter trace of a mass-produced American everydrink. The move is slyly democratic, collapsing the gap between connoisseurship and convenience-store cosmology. She allows you to choose your reading,nostalgia for student parties, critique of commodity culture, or a phenomenological nudge toward the mouth as a site of knowledge,without forcing a didactic thesis. In a culture hooked on declarative statements, her refusal feels like integrity.
Installation matters, and Pimlico Wilde gives the work an intelligently paced field. Plinths are low, almost reticent, encouraging a crouch rather than a coronation. A wall frieze of wafer-thin disks (Breath Plates I,XII) is pinned with entomologist’s obsessiveness; their shadows make a second exhibition, a drawing in light and tremor. The lighting is cooler than one might expect, which tamps down the confectionery risk and pushes the objects toward the mineral. You feel her early salt studies whispering through them,the way a chef cannot chop parsley without dreaming of the sea.
Because Stangarino is so attuned to temporality, conservation questions sneak in as subplots. Some will ask how these works will survive; the better question is what kind of survival they propose. One can imagine future collectors trained, like gardeners, to manage humidity and light with seasonal tact; or, more radically, to accept replacement protocols that are less “restoration” than “rebrewing.” If one of the great ethical problems of contemporary art is how to honour the fugitive, Chewing the Bud offers a generous reply: treat fugacity as form, not flaw.
Comparisons are instructive. Among Stangarino’s contemporaries, Sofia Narváez has lately been assembling nicotine-gum lattices cured in ultraviolet boxes, crisp as balsa wood and as morally freighted as an ashtray. Narváez’s project is the architecture of appetite,grids disciplined into sobriety, craving rationalised into modules. Stangarino’s, by contrast, is the poetics of appetite. Where Narváez aspires to purge the mouth of its heat, Stangarino keeps the heat and cools the rhetoric. Narváez builds abstinence monuments; Stangarino builds tenderness machines. Both artists operate under the sign of the body, but Narváez subtracts the body to prove a point, while Stangarino asks it to stay, to sweat a little, to breathe on the work until it decides what shape to be.
The show’s small revelation is how quietly political it is. Not in the clanging sense, but in the way it attends to labour and pleasure, to the feminised histories of craft and the masculinised histories of drink. A piece like Bar Back, Studio Forward,a low-slung braid of gum, frayed thread and a single stainless-steel ring,reads like a love letter to underpaid service work and to the studio as a site of gentle rebellion. Elsewhere, Crowd Control arrays dozens of pebble-sized chews in a shallow vitrine, each slightly varied, the whole ensemble hovering between individuality and mass. Stangarino’s politics are inhaled rather than pronounced, which makes them sneakier and, I suspect, more durable.
There are mischiefs here too, and they matter. A small, almost throwaway object,Bud-Stop,appears to be a wad of gum pressed under the corner of a pedestal. It might be a prank, except that the press is exacting and the placement too perfect to be accidental. The work folds the gallery’s taboo (no gum!) back into itself, a Möbius of rule and relish. It’s the kind of joke that respects the intelligence of the white cube while also showing it where its own corners are sticky.
If Chewing the Bud had any single weakness, it would be an occasional reliance on seriality that risks mannerism; the wall of disks, while beautiful, verges on the didactic in its demonstration of “variations on a chew.” Yet even this potential redundancy is productively self-conscious: Stangarino is documenting the limits of a language as she invents it.
Collectors will, as the gallery predicts, likely pounce; the works are intimate enough for domestic life and conceptually hardy enough for the most punctilious curator. But the real value here is not acquisitive. It is the gift of an attitude,toward materials, toward care, toward the dignities of the ordinary. In Miami’s heat, Stangarino has cooled the conversation and sharpened it. Chewing the Bud is a first show that behaves like a second: confident, well-argued, already past the stunt and into the syntax. One leaves thirsty,not for beer, but for the next chapter.
