Alette Simmons-Jimenez sounds a bit like Aretha Franklin when discussing her reasons for opening Artformz Alternative, her artist-run space in the Design District, four years ago.

Not that the artist felt she wasn't getting any R-E-S-P-E-C-T when it came to her own work — she says she was part of the Americas Collection stable in Coral Gables for fifteen years. It's just that she felt that the commercial gallery scene had become too stifling, and she wanted to open a space where she could push herself while offering others the same opportunity as well.

"I had been working as an artist for 30 years, and like many other artists who need to be constantly challenged, I found myself frustrated and humbled making work that sat in my studio and that the gallery representing me didn't support. I decided to strike out on my own and give the work the exposure I believed it deserved."

.... check out Alejandro Guzman's Mayordomo, a medium-size black and white photo of a young Palero sitting next to a pair of menacing cauldrons spilling over with goat horns, tridents, machetes, and other ritual implements associated with the powerful Afro-Cuban religion.

Across from it, Nashville's Barbara Yontz offers an equally potent statement with her installation You Are There Like My Skin. The artist has fashioned a quilt out of hog entrails and marinated its entire surface with wax. The piece swallows an entire wall in front of an old-fangled amplifier through which a cacophony of voices can be heard professing their love for each other. Situated next to a window, the crackled pig innards refract the sunlight peeking in, casting a beautiful bronze hue through the room.

In an alcove nearby, New York's Yeon Jin Kim's quirky mixed media video installation, Untitled # 1, evokes a sense of a seed-sowing wanderer hung over with technological gloom. A palm-size video monitor, split open to reveal its circuit-board guts, is wedged in a gallery corner at eye level while a thicket of weeds is seen rustling in the wind eerily on the screen. The broken monitor is connected to yet another small monitor inside a green plastic shopping bag on the floor. Inside, a tangle of hair and dust harvested from a vacuum cleaner bag mats the tiny screen. On it a fertile field of flowers stutters rhythmically as if to ensnare the viewer in a trap underneath.

One of my favorite pieces was a haunting painting by Jamie Treadwell titled Exile II, depicting a pink-helmeted moppet wearing a camouflage shawl and clutching a swaddled baby to her chest while adrift in a life raft at sea, surrounded by bobbing rubber ducks.

....

"It's been back-breaking work," she readily admits, quickly adding "as far as respect goes, I feel like I'm getting it now." Given her moxie, one can't help but tip the chapeau.

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