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A USF exhibition is a fine mix of work by professors who remind us that they are artists, too.
By LENNIE BENNETT
© St. Petersburg Times, published September 1, 2002
TAMPA -- There's something gutsy about teachers putting their own work on display, turning the judges into the judged by their students and peers. The School of Art and Art History Faculty Exhibition happens once every three or so years at the University of South Florida. It opened Friday at the Contemporary Art Museum on the USF campus.
Faculty shows can sometimes be like a browse through a course selection book, instructive but a little boring. This one is a fine mix of work by longtime professors and new faculty members who want to show where they are as artists, not teachers. Some are presenting works outside their medium of instruction. It seems that in this case, those who can also teach.
Theo Wujcik, Jeffrey Kronsnoble and Bruce Marsh deliver on their established reputations as painters who create works of technical mastery, visual beauty and interesting combinations of images. No surprises, but great to see these artists still at the top of their game. Marsh's Port with Ingres is a portrait of a woman in the attire of a Spanish grand dame, painted with 18th century formality. The background is not the expected garden or salon but an industrial port, the weave of her black lace mantilla mimicking the ragged gray skyline.
In Kronsnoble's September 11, horses graze in a bucolic, light-dappled pasture. Instead of rolling fields in the distance we see the twin towers, exploding in smoke below a cerulean sky. It's gorgeously rendered, if unsubtle.
Wujcik's two canvases are titled Lifestyles of the Rich and Faye-moose, with subtitles Return and Rendezvous. Wujcik, whose work makes all kinds of cultural associations, has said that the jumping-off point for this series was a Picasso etching of the late Spanish dictator Franco in drag (he includes Picasso-esque doodles in one canvas), which led his fertile imagination to contemplate other lifestyle issues and vanities.
The figures in Mernet Larsen's new paintings look as if they were assembled from 2 by 4s. Their geometric precision, along with the rigid angularity of the overall composition, should render them cold and mechanistic. Instead, they're endearing, whether the couple is sharing a handshake (in Handshake) or gunfire (in Gunfighters). They are like a version of Nick and Nora of the Thin Man movies, stylized rather than stylish. Larsen piles on the paint in subtle colorations with backgrounds that could stand alone as color field works.
The video sculptures of Robert Lawrence, a new faculty member, will be familiar to those who have seen the Tampa Museum of Art's UnderCURRENT/overVIEW, in which two of his installations are on view. For the faculty show, he has put together www.h-e-r-e.com/newpalm.html, the work's title and also the address of an interactive Web site he includes with all his work. This installation combines the televised image of a palm tree turned upside down, its fronds splayed like roots, with an old surveyor's stick perched atop the TV monitor as if growing out of it like the tree trunk. It's a metaphor for the overdevelopment of Florida distilled to a witty essence.
Works by ceramic artists Ryan Berg and Ed Ross are sculptures in a mixed-media context that look more like wood than clay. Ross has built a scene of beautiful desolation, a sand pile on which a ship's carcass is beached. The clay ribs, stern and bow look like bleached animal bones. The title, Ship of State, is our clue that Ross's reference is the state of democracy.
Berg's Lester Bangs/Fred Astaire (Only Love Can Break Your Heart) references Bangs, music writer and philosopher (remember the character played by Philip Seymour Hoffman in Almost Famous?), and Astaire, the suave dancer and actor, in an attempt, he writes "to reconcile the delights and downfalls of living." Berg creates alter egos for each man from clay sculpted and painted to look like polychrome religious statuary. Bangs becomes an Alice in Wonderland type and Astaire, a Munchkinlike pilgrim, connected by skeins of yarn. Obscure, to be sure, but interesting. Thom McLauglin's Confluence, the architecture of Jan is an installation in memory of the late Jan Abell, a Tampa architect who died in a riding accident in 2000. A favorite chair and reading lamp sit next to a book, a compilation of stories about her by her friends.
Photography is well represented, in traditional prints and manipulated digital images. Printmaking is not. I counted only two -- screen prints by Bradlee Shanks -- surprising given the proximity of Graphicstudio and the richness of its aesthetic resources, and that several of the artists have been master printers there.
Not all of the exhibition was up when I went through. I hope to return to see Hasan Elahi's Abraham, a media installation using submerged TV monitors attached to multicolored tubes of fluorescent lights. I'll also take a turn on Dealer's Choice, Sarah Howard's slot machine (tokens provided) that metes out x and y chromosomes.
With much being written about the decline of fine arts programs in American universities, the irrelevance of museums and the death of conventional art, this show, small but packed with so much depth and variety, is a welcome repudiation of such dire pronouncements.
The University of South Florida School of Art and Art History Faculty Exhibition is on view through Oct. 5 at the Contemporary Art Museum on the USF campus, 4202 E Fowler Ave., Tampa. Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday; 1 to 4 p.m. Saturday. Closed Sunday. Free. (813) 974-2849.