About this Event
Miami Beach Botanical Garden will be hosting Tara Benmeleh's solo exhibition "Moving Altar" from March 5th through April 2nd.
Moving Altar presents a body of collages and large-scale handmade dreamcatchers constructed entirely from found, gifted, or altered materials. Opening at the Miami Beach Botanical Garden, the exhibition positions making as a spiritual practice grounded in availablism, the discipline of working only with what is already present.
At its core, Moving Altar asks a simple but radical question: What happens when spiritual labor is removed from the marketplace?
The works on view refuse the logic that meaning must be bought, that ritual requires specialized tools, or that transformation depends on consumption. Instead, the artist gathers what the environment offers—printed fragments, domestic objects, packaging, ephemera, natural fibers, cast-offs—and recomposes them into sites of attention. Each collage functions less as an image than as a reading surface, a field of signs assembled through intuition, coincidence, and necessity.
The collages are often made under the influence of tea, as tea ceremony is central to Tara’s spiritual practice. The act of steeping, pouring, and drinking becomes a form of attunement, slowing perception and sharpening intuitive association. In this state, assembling fragments mirrors the ritual itself: patient, repetitive, and responsive. The works emerge not from haste, but from a sustained devotional rhythm shaped by heat, breath, and time.
Like drawing cards in a spread or casting shells onto a cloth, these compositions operate as instruments of divination. The juxtaposition of a white dove, a gold laughing buddha, a porcelain vessel; an eye within a pyramid lifted above reaching hands; bodies interrupted by symbols, color fields, and language—each arrangement becomes a moment of interpretation. The works do not illustrate meaning; they generate it. Viewers encounter them as one encounters a reading, searching for correspondences, omens, warnings, and permissions.
The exhibition’s large handmade dreamcatchers extend this logic into space. Constructed from salvaged textiles, wire, plant matter, thread, and found structural elements, they function as filters, devices for sorting psychic residue, holding intention, and interrupting unwanted energies. Their scale transforms them from decorative objects into architectural thresholds, passages rather than ornaments.
In spiritual terms, the refusal to spend money is not austerity but alignment. Across many traditions, ritual power arises from attention, intention, and relationship, not from purchased objects. By working only with what is available, the practice resists scarcity thinking, honors the agency of materials, and removes financial barriers to spiritual engagement. Availablism proposes that the sacred is already present in the immediate environment; one need only learn how to see and assemble it.
The exhibition’s title, Moving Altar, reflects this ethos. Rather than a fixed site of devotion, the altar becomes mobile, carried through daily life, assembled from circumstance, responsive to place. The gallery installation extends this idea through a live altar that will evolve over the course of the exhibition. Visitors are invited to contribute found objects, written intentions, natural materials, or personal fragments, allowing the space to function as a collective site of offering and reading.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Miami Beach Botanical Garden, 2000 Convention Center Dr, Miami Beach, United States
USD 0.00
