Installation view of “Heart Strings.” Photo by Francesco Casale

When walking into the Dimensions Variable gallery (a Knight Arts grantee), you get the feeling of entering a hanging garden, but one that may appear in the Everglades, or in an otherwise semi-tended organic reserve. Two large pieces, one of silver, one of gold, hang from the ceiling, made up of thousands and thousands of tiny threaded Mylar hearts dripping from strings. They look a little like creatures with tons of tendrils – jelly fish, growths from a swamp tree? From the walls sprout colorful little blooms, maybe flowers, maybe algae. While crafted from totally man-made materials, they have life to them.

Of course, this perception of the exhibit “Heart Strings” is likely informed by the place we inhabit down here, as the artist Goran Tomcic lives in Berlin, was educated in New York and born in Croatia (although he did do a stint here in Miami in the 1990s). In fact the two main sculptures are part of a series called “Shimmering Hearts,” of which there will eventually be six, that have shown all over the globe.

Tomcic explained that while there are similarities to all of his pieces, the “Heart Strings” exhibit in Miami feels the most abstract to him. While he considers himself a storyteller (he is a published poet and art critic), and that his works often have a story to tell, in this case the tales got diffused somewhat, where he lost control of its growth.

“Wall blooms in the hanging garden.” Photo by Francesco Casale

“This time I felt it all got more abstracted for several reasons,” he said while stopping through Miami for the installation and opening. “It was such a long, tedious process, something like Penelope’s Syndrome. In the past six months, I had literary done not much else but stringing those hearts. So much that it became organic but not in a way of a jungle, rather as an organically controlled garden.

“And there are all those metaphors of the heart, and my logic always is: more is less. If you put one heart in the gallery it is screaming at you, but if you have many (one million in Shimmering Heart installations), they become a field.”

Whether or not he had Miami’s particular eco-scape in mind when conceiving this show, he said, is also an abstract conception. “Miami is a garden per se and the city is not afraid of colors, so perhaps there could be a relationship there,” he said. “But then again, I am from the Mediterranean [the Dalmatian Coast of Croatia], so Miami is somehow home-like.”

“Heart Strings” from Goran Tomcic runs through Aug. 22 at Dimensions Variable, 100 N.E. 11th St., Miami; dimensionsvariable.net.