ECLIPSE

ECLIPSE was Hannes Bend's first solo exhibition in Miami, presented at Charest-Weinberg Gallery in 2012. For the project, Bend dredged up nearly one hundred tires from the failed Osborne Artificial Reef off the coast of Fort Lauderdale — an artificial reef begun in 1972 from between one and two million discarded car tires, which collapsed into one of South Florida's most visible ecological disasters.

The salvaged tires were installed in the gallery alongside underwater video, dive footage, and large-scale projections of sea, sky, and submerged bodies. The installation expanded Bend's practice from painting and sculpture into environmental, research-based work — bringing industrial debris, mediated imagery, and ecological history into a single charged space.

ECLIPSE examined the contemporary sublime not as untouched nature, but as an entanglement of industrial debris, failed human design, ecological consequence, and projection. Perception, in this work, is not neutral: it is historical, material, contaminated, and implicated. The exhibition marks a pivotal transition from object-based practice toward immersive, interdisciplinary, and research-driven work.