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LENNIE BENNETTIt's disheartening to learn that most artists in the Tampa Bay area must also keep a day job. But a new exhibit of their work soon lifts the spirits.
TAMPA - The good news, based on "underCURRENT/overVIEW7" at the Tampa Museum of Art, is that museum-quality art is being created locally. Troubling is that two-thirds of the 14 artists in the exhibition do not work full time at it; most teach at the Ringling School of Art and Design, the University of Tampa or the University of South Florida.
What does that say about us?
I believe it means we have very fine schools attracting good teachers and practitioners training promising young artists who rarely stay in the area. There are exceptions, but the sad truth seems to be that, unless you move here because you have reached a commercial level that allows you to live anywhere you choose (think James Rosenquist, who lives in Aripeka but sells his work through dealers elsewhere), fine art in the Tampa Bay area generally doesn't pay.
At least we have schools and universities that provide working wages for a talented few, and the occasional show such as this one that gives these artists a local venue.
Emily Kass organized the first "underCURRENT/overVIEW" in 1997, a year after she became director of the Tampa museum, to introduce museumgoers to fine artists living and working in Pinellas and Hillsborough counties. At that time, she had no curator of contemporary art, so artists were chosen based on nominations from local experts. Kass, whose expertise is in contemporary and modern art, found after several years that she needed to broaden the geographical base of the search to include surrounding counties. She also hired a curator and brought the selection process in-house. The exhibition was eliminated from last year's schedule because of the uncertainty surrounding construction start dates for the museum's new building.
That uncertainty remains, though Kass hopes, based on recent remarks by Mayor Pam Iorio, that ground will be broken by the end of the year. Still, Kass and her staff decided to plow ahead with the seventh "underCURRENT/overVIEW."
The collection represents a broad sweep through international trends that reflect what Kass terms the "anything goes" nature of contemporary art.
It also refutes a commonly held belief that good contemporary art is difficult or inaccessible.
"It's such a misconception," Kass says. "The word "contemporary' is so loaded. It really just has to do with a time period."
So you will find here sophisticated art that cleaves to painterly traditions as well as art that relies on technology. What makes the works "contemporary" are the ideas that inform them.
The showstopper, installed in the middle of the main gallery, is Dee Hood's Transients, a massive hanging of tire shards. She cuts abandoned tires into strips that shred and curl, then hangs the pieces in graduating lengths. Downlighting adds shadows that lengthen the hanging. It's a wonderful concept, loaded with ideas of permanence and flux, obsolescence, dislocation. Several paintings accompany the installation. In Where Are You, the vague topography suggests, like the title, an attempt to map loss, to find a way back to some starting point.
Saying Juliet Davis' two CD-ROM installations "explore gender issues and women's place in society" is true but weighs down the entertaining and thought-provoking work with a tiresome polemic. Both installations are interactive. In Pieces of Herself, a blank silhouette of a body stands beside a screen that, with a mouse click, pans through a kitchen, bedroom, office, living room, bathroom and exterior scenes. As you move the mouse along, icons pop up - a mask when the front door opens, for example, or an eye in the window of the bathroom. Move them to the silhouette, and you can dress the woman, even fill her up, with references of your choice.
Polystyrene Dream uses the Barbie doll in a similar way, even though the "packaging" of her is less personal and more generic. Click the mouse and Barbie is dressed for dinner, standing in front of a reproduction of Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper. Click an option on that screen and you are directed to a Barbie breadmaking kit or a wine tasting party.
Chortle along as you scroll through subsequent ones with more edge. As Be My Baby plays, Barbie's Fertility Clinic comes up. From there you're led to the "Let's Have a Baby" window, in which you can click sperm of various colors that fertilize an egg, which in turn becomes a new Barbie or Ken. The first one is a Miss America Barbie. Others, such as Fat Barbie, Addict Barbie or Transgender Ken have, we're told, been discontinued. It's tongue-in-cheek to the point of being a little overobvious, but it's still clever and well-done.
Wendy Babcox's dual screen video, Looking Forward to the New Year, is just as accessible, using an owl (the cute factor) as the central image. Switching from screen to screen, the bird swivels its head to the back, looks at us straight on or glances sideways. Each gesture is keyed to the appearance of a second image. When the owl looks at us from one screen, a hand stroking its fur always accompanies it. When the owl looks behind, a leopard appears, on the prowl. A side look brings rushing water. In the constantly shifting order of the same pictures, we're asked to consider how point of view influences our perception.
Those who believe the adage that clothes make the man might wonder what to make of fiber artist Sheryl Haler's earthy garments, which look to measure about 12 feet in length, embellished with simple metal armatures and, according to wall labels, a snake rattle and snakeskin. Or her infant-sized dress of velvet and chiffon held together with pins and thorns. What I take from these "clothes" is that sometimes what we wrap our bodies in is not a covering but an exposure of self.
Painting is well-represented, too. Peg Trezevant's panel paintings, which resemble early Renaissance religious works, are invested with a modern vernacular, as is Tonya Clay's triptych. In Annunciation, Conception and Birth, a woman makes an epic journey toward motherhood in three large paintings loaded with Christian references - telephone poles as crosses - and layered symbols, especially the red, white and blue parasail in various stages of fullness that ascend through clouds like a resurrection.
And so much more art worth pondering. Elizabeth Coffman and Ted Hardin examine their long-distance romance in Long Distance, a two-channel video, one edited by him, one by her, projected on the pillows of a gauze-draped bed. (More good news/bad news: Coffman, a professor at the University of Tampa, is moving to Chicago to be with Hardin, with whom she is making a documentary about George Nader. As Hardin quipped, "The next videos might be Short Distance, No Distance, Not Enough Distance.") Mark Petty supplements civil rights-era photographs with boxes shaped like crosses but resembling coffins filled with memorabilia of slavery and earlier immigration. They resonate with hope and disillusion.
Douglas Loewen's kinetic installation gets a gallery of its own, the small one right off the museum's entrance. And what a show he provides, a Rube Goldberg contraption of many elements, powered by a motor hung from bungee cords and old satellite TV frames. The tension from the bungee cords whips a mobile of small lead fish around a big blue plastic basin, sets tiny lead dancers clinking into crystal goblets placed on musicians' stands and bounces ball bearings across white surfaces, leaving small marks that will eventually become a complete set of "drawings" and part of the installation.
It's mesmerizing and memorable even as it relies on surface pleasures.
That's the sort of dichotomy that makes art interesting. And a visit to "underCURRENT/overVIEW" will be one of the most interesting art encounters of the summer.
- Lennie Bennett can be reached at 727 893-8293 or lennie@sptimes.com
REVIEW"underCURRENT/overVIEW7" is at the Tampa Museum of Art, 600 N Ashley Drive, through Sept. 26. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday and 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. the third Thursday of every month. Adults $7, seniors $6, students $3. By donation 5 to 8 p.m. third Thursdays and 10 a.m. to noon Saturdays. (813) 274-8130. A free gallery guide accompanies the exhibition.