UNTITLED ART, MIAMI BEACH

December 2-7 2025

WAAM is excited to participate in Untitled Art in Miami Beach this year. Reflecting Pattern presents the work of two pioneering Florida artists, Akiko Kotani and Lynne Golob Gelfman (1944-2020).

Together, Gelfman and Kotani engage with nature as both subject and source, transforming its patterns into meditations on movement, material, and memory. Reflecting Pattern considers how repetition and abstraction can hold the essence of place, whether remembered, observed, or imagined.

Through disciplined repetition, minimal abstraction, and tactile materiality, both artists translate imagined and remembered landscapes into works that reflect the rhythms and patterns of the natural world.

Lynne Golob Gelfman’s cloud water sand series which she began in 2008 reflects her longstanding fascination with the interplay of light on water’s shifting surfaces, and the quiet disorientation of optical illusion. Through layered processes of painting and sanding, she creates diaphanous fields of color and texture that evoke the shimmer of light on moving water. Drawing inspiration from landscapes as varied as Brazil, Colombia, North Africa, as well as from non-Western aesthetic traditions, Gelfman approaches each work as part of a larger, unfolding whole, its edges suggesting a continuation beyond the canvas. Over more than three decades in Miami, she developed an experimental, process-driven practice that challenged conventional mark-making while remaining deeply attuned to the subtleties of perception over time.

Akiko Kotani’s work transforms simple gestures, stitching, crocheting, threading, into expansive meditations on movement, memory, and the forces of the natural world. In her monumental crochet installation Burst, a tidal wave of large, crocheted, satin panels appears to surge from a fissure in the wall capturing both the power and stillness of water held in suspension. Her Douro River thread-on-paper works trace the contours of remembered landscapes in Portugal, distilling them into rhythmic, tactile lines. Kotani’s practice, shaped in part by her study of Mayan weaving techniques in Guatemala, treats repetition as a means of both recording and reimagining nature. The quiet discipline of her mark-making allows each work to oscillate between awareness and sensation, without an implied reference to the physicality of a place, inviting viewers to inhabit the space between observation and recollection.