Sasha Wortzel’s unsettling art returns a sense of the uncanny to today’s ubiquitous images of climate collapse. Inside the entrance to this Miami Beach space, visitors encountered For those of us who live at the shoreline (sunrise), 2020, a looped video showing a fiery orange ball ascending majestically over the steaming swamps of Florida’s Big Cypress National Preserve. But there is a glitch: Each time it reaches a certain spot in the sky it slows to a halt and then lurches back down the horizon, ping-ponging back and forth, only to begin the process again. The work conjures an existential dread that suffused Wortzel’s “Dreams of Unknown Islands,” an exhibition that carefully considered how Florida’s sublimated colonial history intersects with its present-day ecological ruin.
