For the most part, Second Saturdays usually offer gallery goers with a lot of sound and no fury. That’s why it’s always refreshing when something different and unexpected manages to slip through the cracks.

Last Saturday’s Cutting-Edge Framing exhibition curated by New York-based Lola Sinreich and Miami-based Win McCarthy was one such exception.

The show takes its name from the Design District frame shop that once inhabited the exhibition space. The store, now out of business, and storefront now up for lease, offered up a unique opportunity for 18 artists (including many out-of-towners) to put together a one-off show in the vacant space.

One of Miami’s most valuable resources is the abundance of unusual and available venues for displaying art and utilizing space in ways regular galleries can’t. In times of economic downturn, especially, more opportunities like these present themselves to artists.

Location is especially key with Cutting-Edge Framing. While there are common threads throughout the work, the show engages with the venue more than anything else. Each piece carries on a dialogue with the space almost independently of one another. Had the same show taken place at a regular gallery, it wouldn’t be as successful.

The unorthodox nature of the venue, frame-store as gallery dichotomy, was continued within the work itself where many of the pieces on display served to bend and blur the line of their intended medium. You have paintings that can also be considered sculptures (or to have sculptural properties), or sculptures that incorporate elements of painting, and other such reconfigurations of media.

The show will be on view by appointment only for the next two weeks.

11 N.E 39th St., Miami; [email protected]