So I spent last weekend in Miami looking at acres and acres of art, and I’ll be putting up sometime posts on artists I got hooked on down there. I’ll start local: Isaac Layman and Claude Zervas, both of Seattle. In Miami, both were at the Aqua fair, Layman at SOIL and Zervas at James Harris.

I first saw Layman’s bookcase photograph in SOIL’s photography survey a few months ago. It is a digital pile of images, but also a portrait arranged physically, a face with as much outward presence and inward mystery as any person’s (what are the subjects of these books? why are they turned away?). And then the digital sewing begins to show. There are seams everywhere, and once you spot one, you spot them all. Does this make things fall apart or come together? Not clear. Layman doesn’t have gallery representation—yet—and I’m not sure when he’ll have a show locally, but I’ll keep you posted. Can’t wait to see more of him.

Claude Zervas has been around for a while, and done photography, more traditional (and even humorous) sculpture, and probably other mediums that I’m not even aware of. But it feels like he has come fully into his own with these light sculptures that glow and dangle and drag and are named and molded after natural Northwestern occurrences such as rivers, pasages, shoals, and nudibranches (a kind of mollusk) (can you guess which above is which?).

The delicacy and commitment to white are affecting. In Nooksack (third down), referring to the Nooksack River and in the collection of the Seattle Art Museum, Zervas lays the cords down unpreciously, but they do draw the basic curves of a river’s ripples, or of the way it might meet land. The less determinate light coming from the pieces with slowly blinking LEDs is mesmerizing. Like Richard Tuttle’s wire drawings or Eva Hesse’s fleshy, dangling sculptures, Zervas’s pieces have the feeling of utter contingency.