As you can imagine, these are different spaces that you wouldn't normally walk in and see contemporary art.

For any passerby here that come across this piece, they're going to look up and be like, whoa, what is this?

This is I think it's the role of an artist to show the work or is narrative everywhere he can.

A project like this, it gives me a reason to walk into 12 different hotels, to see what it's like in their lobby.

I can see is that doing an extra bonus for even for someone who lives here?

No vacancy is a program from the city of Miami Beach that fits culture and tourism together.

We commissioned 12 artists to create new works at 12 hotel properties throughout the city.

The No Vacancy program is open to Miami and Miami Dade County artists.

We really want to be able to have the opportunity for the artists to show their work during the most iconic time of the year for us.

Obviously, we have Art Basel Miami Beach.

The artists are not aware of the spaces that they will be paired with, and that's the job of our curatorial team matching these specific works of art in these specific sites.

My name is Allison Matherly.

I'm Jeffrey Noble and we are nice and easy.

So this work above us here is titled Soft Squeeze is comprised of a collection of custom made inflatables.

They take the form of pool floats and flamingos, gators, turtles, a lot of the sort of cliche wildlife that you find here in South Florida.

We're interested in human production and how we're always imprinting it with nature.

It is interesting that you would kind of have to apply without knowing where you're going.

We did have that in the application, wanting it to be outdoors instead of indoors.

We thought this was a unique location where we could utilize this alleyway, have the work suspended overhead, kind of wedged in here almost as a metaphor for how development civilization sort of encroaches upon nature and sort of, you know, squeezes it.

Yeah.

The moment I knew that I would be here at Surfcomber, I knew I had a chance to make it work.

That falls within what I tend to think about when I think about South Florida.

The work I'm displaying is titled object, Landscapes and Things is this sort of gathering of textures, objects, and even views of landscape that I've made into three works a photograph, a sculpture, and a painting.

This painting is made of multiple images that begins with a view of a citrus plant.

There's a mockingbird.

There's a view of pine rock forest.

A street and it sort of ends with an orchid in the bottom.

This is a painting.

Of which I speak of.

How do we organize landscape?

How do we organize place?

And paintings tend to be one of these places where we organize according to.

Value.

This sculpture has to do more with the textures of actual landscape.

It repeats the sort of plants that are outside.

So we have some orchids here.

We have a piece of wood that is a mangrove, and then the fabric which is the more dominant part is folded on itself.

And the last piece is a photograph of a still life made of various flowers arranged for the camera.

I think this work is as much for someone who lives here as for someone who's visiting.

I think there's something for both.

This year I was fortunate enough to do a project within the Casa Faena.

This work IRC is a representation of whimsical portrayals of Floridian wildlife that are suspended in this room.

They are made of mirrored rose gold plexi which are delicately suspended within the space.

The feeling when you walked into Casa Fina, you feel this kind of old Florida style, and you can see kind of in the details of the architecture.

And to bring something that felt contemporary in the space felt like a good juxtaposition.

The delicate nature of the materials, kind of suspended, felt similar to the kind of the delicate nature that we exist in and our relationship to it.

I also feel like within that, the reflection of the mirror kind of asks us what our responsibility to that environment is as well.

The title of this piece that I created specifically for the Cadillac Hotel is titled Rhapsody for a Beloved World.

I think everything is in the title.

I am talking about love.

I am talking about sharing ideas, sharing concepts to create a better world.

The piece is in backlight because I wanted to highlight the good part of the world.

You can see a little white girl and a little black boy.

They are playing together.

What I love in this connection between both of them.

It's not care about people, not care about the world.

We are there, but we are enjoying the world.

And I think that that is what we should do every day.

This is literally the first time I've shown anything in Miami.

I've been showing internationally for 4 or 5 years, but this is my hometown debut.

I began to draw these marks, and this mark that's in the drawings is this thing we call the Ray in the studio.

It's just a weird squiggly ray that I literally have been drawing now drawing now for 35 years.

We call these dodecagon drawings, and they're multicolored and they're always different and they're always freehand.

And so they look almost alike, but not quite.

A lot of my practice is about memory.

Collective memory that we all share.

And the dodecagon represents the hours on a clock, the months in a year, the zodiac, in essence, the passage of time.

I've taken the ray that I've been drawing forever, making the ray 12 times in a 12-sided figure.

And that integrates the ray drawings into the practice in which I'm always trying to think about and talk about the passage of time.

When I ask somebody what their most vivid collective memory is, they immediately go to it and it takes them to a place they haven't been in a very long time.

If I can do that with a piece of art, I'm pretty happy.

No vacancy is an incredible example of how my city, the city of Miami Beach, has stepped up and begun to lead.

When it comes to culture in our South Florida community.

The great thing about it is that it runs much longer than Art week, and it gives the opportunity for our residents and our visitors to kind of make a day out of it, like a scavenger hunt.

We have maps available.

You can grab a bike and spend the day with your friends visiting each of the 12 locations.

Miami came to existence with South Beach and then Art Deco, and I feel like just to kind of be a part of that lineage of kind of the art in the city is important to me.

But also, like, I think it's important to bring it outside of the galleries to the public so they can see it as well.

Artwork is made to be lived with.

Artwork is not necessarily made to exist in a museum.

Artwork is made to be in your living room, in your bedroom, in your hallway, in the foyer, or a lobby of a hotel.

It's meant to be shared.