There's A Gator In The Pool
The Faena Art Project Room was founded with a singular pursuit: To commission sitespecific installations by emerging local artists that push the boundaries of their traditional practice.
As part of Faena’s broader vision to merge art and life in immersive, experiential ways, the Project Room offers a platform for artists to dream bigger and create boldly within a space designed for transformation.
For its latest installation, Faena Art selected Miami-based multimedia artist Alex Nuñez, whose energetic practice blurs painting, performance and environment. A graduate of the School of Visual Arts in New York and the artist-in-residence at the Rubell Museum in 2019, Nuñez is also a founding member of Collective 62, an all-female studio collective in Liberty City that champions creative collaboration and female voices in the arts. Her new work, There’s a Gator in the Pool, invites viewers to step into a living painting.
In this site-specific exhibit, Nuñez transforms the Faena Art Project Room into a South Florida setting with ocean inspired walls and a large blue pool with a gator swimming in it. Drawing from the dreamlike tensions of her personal geographies—with family roots in Cuba, New Orleans, and Miami— Nuñez reminds us of the surreal nature of local life, where the shimmer of a backyard pool holds both wonder and the wild with the sudden glimpse of a gator beneath the surface.
The title of the artwork nods to the unexpected thrill and quiet fear of nature reclaiming domestic space. In Nuñez’s hands, the gator becomes a symbol, a reminder that paradise is always edged with unpredictability. “The artwork feels almost like a weekend by the pool. It’s a bit of an escape, where she hand painted the walls with blue and green waves,” said Nicole Comotti, the director of Faena Art. “The large abstract paintings with swirls of color that move around the canvas, with f lickers of multi color metallic foils that shimmer like water across the room like the glittering tops of pools in the summer.” Nuñez likes to play with the reflective qualities of water, where color, texture, and light collide to create a tropical surrealism that is both seductive and slightly unsettling. There’s a sensory unease where beauty meets risk, and where the boundaries between land, water, and dream dissolve. It’s a wet-hot Floridian summer thrill.
