Join us on February 20, 2025, at 6 pm for a conversation about the exhibition Stratified Gestures, featuring artists Gerbi Tsesarskaia, Nicole Burko, and Yanira Collado, moderated by Leyden Rodriguez-Casanova.
Gerbi Tsesarskaia
Gerbi Tsesarskaia was born in Zsitomir, Ukraine. After graduating from the Marine Technical University of St. Petersburg in 1980 with an M.S. in Mechanical Engineering, for four years she worked as an electrical engineer at “Elektrosila” Research Institute. In 1985 Gerbi moved to Budapest, Hungary, got married, and made a sharp turn in her career. After learning Hungarian she worked first as an art books seller, then later as a translator-interpreter, as well as a marionette puppet maker at the Budapest National Puppet Theater. In 1990 Gerbi moved to Florida where her husband pursued his doctoral studies at the University of Miami. In 1994 she joined the Ceramic League of Miami. At the CLM she first took, later taught courses in wheel throwing. In 2002 she was accepted to the graduate program at Florida Atlantic University and graduated with an M.F.A. in ceramics in 2005. After a brief period of teaching at FAU she moved her studio to the Bakehouse Art Complex, where she currently works as an independent artist. From August 2009 she has been teaching ceramics courses at the University of Miami and at Miami International University of Art and Design as an adjunct instructor. Gerbi has participated in numerous national and international exhibitions including two world competitions in Korea and Rumania. Her work has been included in many private and two museum collections in Korea and Romania.
Nicole Burko
Nicole Burko was born in Toronto, Canada, and lives and works in Miami, Florida. Burko received an MFA from Columbia University (2019) in Visual Art and a BFA from New World School of the Arts (2021) in Painting. Nicole Burko’s landscape paintings explore the limits of the natural world, the human body, and psychological depth. Rooted in her own experiences of freediving on a single breath into underwater caverns, her immersive oil paintings create a dialogue between desire, dread, and mortality. Here, there is no safe distance— no comfortable vantage point from which to observe the sublime. Instead, Burko draws viewers to the edge of the unknown, inviting them to contemplate feelings of discomfort and vulnerability as the surface recedes.
Selected exhibitions include Draw at the Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum, Miami (2023); Super Natural at Baker-Hall (formerly Club Gallery), Miami (2023); Biscayne Bay at the Kampong, Miami (2023); The Wanderers at Tile Blush Gallery, Miami (2019); and Columbia University’s MFA Thesis Exhibition at Wallach Gallery, New York (2019). Burko is a studio resident at Dimensions Variable, Miami, FL.
Yanira Collado
In her practice, Collado displays an awareness of language conveyed through a keen analysis of identity, the latter referenced in her use of reclaimed literary texts and textiles, simultaneously opposed by various construction materials: wood, concrete, masonry brick, iron, and drywall. Materials with inherent geographic histories, processes, and economies imply varying degrees of personalized and public memory.
As Yanira describes. “My work attempts to assemble a visual language that reconciles the process in which the history of this information is recorded, stored, and retrieved. I am interested in the labor inherent in these materials and the shapes taken during their transitions, which conjure up invocations, ritual, a transcendence of presence, and in many ways, fragments becoming whole.”
Yanira Collado is an artist who lives and works in Miami, FL. She studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Collado’s artist residencies include Artpace, San Antonio, TX (2022); Oolite Arts, South Beach, FL (2019-2022); and Joan Mitchell Center, New Orleans (2020, 2022). Collado’s awards and fellowships include a Foundation for Contemporary Arts emergency grant (2022), a South Florida Consortium Fellowship (2021), Ellies Creator Grant (2019), and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant (2018). Her group shows include El Triennal – Estamos Bien, Museo del Barrio, NY (2021); Penumbras: sacred geometries, Project Row Houses, Houston, TX (2019); Monarchs, Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, FL (2018); Connectivity, Deconstruction, The Patricia & Philip Frost Art Museum, Florida International Museum, Miami, FL (2018); and Transmissions, The Franklin, Chicago, IL (2015). Collado’s solo exhibitions include Alchemic Chants/ Reliquias Fragmentadas, Emerson Dorsch Gallery, Miami Fl (2021); If they knew these things/ Reliquias ocultadas, Dimensions Variable, Miami, FL, (2020); Penumbras at Under the Bridge Art Space, Miami, FL (2019); Original Condition, a one person exhibit at MDC Museum of Art + Design in collaboration with Bridge Red Studios, Miami, FL (2016); and Untitled at Project Row Houses, Houston, TX (2015).
Leyden Rodriguez-Casanova
Leyden Rodriguez-Casanova (b. 1973 Havana, Cuba) is an Artist, Curator, Co-founder and Co-director of Dimensions Variable (DV) and Fulano Inc. His work has been exhibited widely at Sculpture Center, Socrates Sculpture Park, Abrons Arts Center and White Box in New York; Museo de Bellas Artes and Factoria Habana in Havana, Cuba; ZONA MACO Arte Contemporaneo in Mexico City, Mexico; Capri Palace and Villa Lena in Italy; Prosjektrom Normanns in Stavanger, Norway; PAMM, Frost Museum, The Bass, MOCA, DV and Locust Projects in Miami. His work is in many public and private collections around the world and institutions like PAMM, Frost Museum, Cintas Foundation, and The Bass. He has been written about in the New York Times, The Miami Herald, Art Nexus, Arte al Dia, Artforum, Artsy, Sculpture Magazine, Hyperallergic, The Miami Rail, and Miami Magazine. Since founding DV in 2009, he has organized and curated many projects by local and international emerging artists.
