Bauer, Paumier, Rosales/
PULSE Miami
INDIAN BEACH PARK | DECEMBER 4 - 7, 2014
De Soto Gallery presented a group exhibition featuring works by Amelia Bauer, Brian Paumier, and Ramona Rosales at PULSE Miami 2014. The presentation brought together three distinct photographic practices, each linked by an emphatic and deliberate use of color—often pushed to the extreme—and an interest in how visual storytelling is shaped through light, tone, and iconography.
Amelia Bauer’s Book of Shadows reimagines the still life genre using ingredients culled from witchcraft rituals and spells. Drawing from 17th-century European painting traditions, Bauer constructs elaborate floral arrangements illuminated in unnatural colored light. The result is a haunting interplay of beauty and threat, nature and artifice, power and mysticism. Her photographs explore the historical entanglement of femininity, nature, and the occult—rendering these connections with theatrical precision.
Brian Paumier’s Act of Faith transforms autobiography into devotional spectacle. Inspired by a promise he made to the Virgin of Guadalupe after surviving an ambush in Iraq, Paumier creates altar-like photographic assemblages that trace his layered identity. Military references, religious iconography, and personal artifacts collide in richly colored tableaux that meditate on faith, masculinity, and resilience. His work examines the intersections of violence, belief, and self-invention.
Ramona Rosales’s Outside the Lines offers stylized, open-ended narratives where subjects are cast in saturated scenes of aftermath and ambiguity. Each set is constructed to test how color harmony shapes emotional tone, leaving the viewer to interpret the fragments of story. Objects, gestures, and environments become symbols in flux, blurring the line between advertising aesthetics and personal mythologies. Rosales uses the photographic frame as a stage for visual experimentation and narrative disruption.
Together, Bauer, Paumier, and Rosales challenge conventional representations of identity, belief, and imagination through bold formal choices and highly constructed photographic worlds.
