At the onset of Miami Art Week, curator and gallerist Tyler Emerson-Dorsch will transform the gallery into a flexible space designed by architect, Germane Barnes and artist, Karen Rifas, in order to host the second gathering of Paradise Commons, a loose network of artists, curators, philosophers, and cultural producers who are actively reading, sharing, writing, and discussing objecthood and the aesthetics of Paradise. A collection of writings, articles and references are published online at Paradise Journal as part of Paradise Library, a nomadic collection of physical texts.

Paradise Summit Miami at Emerson Dorsch is a group art exhibition and site for Paradise Library where the Paradise group and guests gather to explore ideas. For the Miami audience, the group curated the library by flagging references from the essay Facing Necrophilia or “Botox Ethics” by artist and theorist, Katherine Behar. Participants and audiences activate this collection when they use the space as a research facility and for private topical discussions. Paradise library is constantly expanding based on new conversations. Librarian and philosophy scholar, Lori Kelly, in Key West, hosted the first iteration of Paradise Summit in April 2018.

At Paradise Library, users are allowed to write in the margins. This traces back to Kelly’s experience as a librarian at PAMM. She was gathering and taking inventory of all the books that curators had purchased and used for researching their exhibitions for the past decade or more. She observed how much insight was there in the margins where curators had left notes. Reading them was like tapping in to their individual minds and if viewed together gave intimate access to the brain of the institution as a collective.

One of the founders of the group, Felecia Chizuko Carlisle writes, “As a collective, we communicate, restore, fortify and produce “knowing” outside any institution, in the margins. The concept of marginality as it is played out in society is foundational to our purpose in thinking about Paradise – a place outside the center, away from daily life – a place to escape where “real” things happen. “Paradise” absolutely has use value.” Commissioned by the gallery, “Exploding Staircase,” the functional design for Paradise Summit Miami is created in collaboration between architect Germane Barnes and artist Karen Rifas. Art by group members and guests will adorn the walls. Artists participating in this portion of the show, in addition to Barnes and Rifas, include Marcus Blake, Felecia Chizuko Carlisle, Elisabeth Condon, Catherine Annie Hollingsworth, Najja Moon, Fifty-Fifty Collective (Laurencia Strauss and Lisa Bulawsky), Mette Tommerup and Paula Wilson.