Take This Waltz
Christina Pettersson brings Take This Waltz, a gothic exploration of Miami’s environment, mythology, and decline, to the Faena Art’s Project Room.
“How do we hear the dead?” This is the unanswerable question posed by Christina Pettersson in Take This Waltz, the newest installation at the Faena Art Project Room. Pettersson is an artist whose imagination dives deep under the surface, the better to interrogate the biggest and most provocative ideas. Born in Stockholm, then transplanted to Miami, where she’s lived most of her life, Pettersson is a dedicated student of Miami’s cultural and environmental history.
Her work centers on the city, both its achievements and its losses. Her lengthy résumé includes exhibits at the country’s most prestigious museums, from Birmingham to Baltimore, and her work is in major national collections. Still, her central theme is always the unique landscapes, traditions, quirks, and myths of Florida. Take This Waltz is both a celebration of Miami and an exploration of its dark side.
A gothic, carnivalesque masquerade of wildcats and sea birds, mangroves and palmettos, the video installation brings this funeral procession to life. An elegy to the plants and animals that used to occupy the space the city was built on, a mourning of the dead, but at the same time, an invitation to enter into that world and get to know it. Pettersson’s loyalty is to the bygone, but she invites you to join her in falling in love—or even just fascination—with the past, ghosts, and all.
Years from now, when Florida’s marshy Everglades are buried under liters of salt and sea, Christina Pettersson’s work will be its haunting tombstone”
- Arts and Culture Journalist Nicole Martinez
