Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Art

An exhibit that needs editing

The latest installation at a St. Petersburg gallery is a tad artless in its presentation, but it does have some good work to present.

By LENNIE BENNETT
Published June 23, 2005

	[Images from Project Creo Center for Art and Design
	Steven Gregory, Back Porch, 2005, digitally manipulated print.

ST. PETERSBURG - "Counterpoint," the latest multiartist installation at Project Creo Center for Art and Design at the Pier, lacks the cohesion of other exhibitions that have had a clear unifying idea. I'm thinking of "Transparencies" and "In Motion" as examples, group shows that had in common an idea (seeing into or through) or a medium (nonstatic art such as video and kinetic constructions). And that's okay; art doesn't always have to be served up like a theme park, spoon-fed to us with obvious aesthetic links.

But in this case, the effect is sensory overload. Despite a thoughtful installation, there's just too much here, some of it incomprehensible or maybe not worthy of comprehension. The positive news is that the good, or at least interesting, artworks stand out.

Two videos are among them. Forgo the wall text and immerse yourself in Jesse Seay's Bete Noir. While a viola plaintively saws one note like a deep sigh, a string loops itself into a tangle, growing, struggling and straining like those insects in nature films fighting for survival. After you absorb the video, read the artist's statement and learn that she has always been craft-challenged, uncomfortable with traditional mediums such as paint and clay (which is why she turned to video). She confronts this "bete noir" (French for "dark beast" in reference to things that haunt or thwart us) by trying her hand at crocheting, which is what we're seeing. But not really. No hook, no hand intervenes. The string has a life of its own. Seay has reversed the process so Bete Noir records not the act of creation but decreation, an unraveling of the chain stitches as her hands, out of sight, pull them apart.

Cinema of the Blind, Jose Martinez's offering, is more complex. The narrative oscillates between moody black-and-white dream sequences of a woman drowning, walking toward a deserted mansion or in a forest, spliced with interludes in color that jolt us back to the mechanics and process of producing art: books for inspiration; pen and ink; an old typewriter, shot from inside its guts, clattering away; a film editing machine. It ends with a convergence in which the young woman, dressed unambiguously in contemporary clothes, enters a house strewn with bedding and trash and about to be demolished. It's obviously a homecoming, because she looks at old photographs of a mother and child that precipitate filmed "flashbacks" that look like old home movies. The involved and very accomplished video winds its way toward an ending that alludes to its title, the idea that confronting the past is a stumbling exercise.

On the lighter side, sort of, are Scott Fleenor's kinetic sculptures, Rube Goldberg-type constructions using old clock gears to power assemblages such as a doll's head that opens its eyes and sticks out its tongue at us, or a painted carnival barker that leers at us from a "Sin Eater." For a quarter, we can drop a list of transgressions in a box and he "will take care of the rest." (If you have a long list, suggested donation is two quarters.)

Marguerite Garth's photographs, digitally produced and "aged," are contemporary images framed by art from illuminated manuscripts and titled as biblical phrases in Latin. The idea is good; they sometimes falter from too obvious a polemic - an eagle (symbol of the environment) superimposed over a crucifixion scene? Better was A Voice Crying in the Desert, a shot of a pickup truck's rear window plastered with decals extolling things like the Crazee Cowboy Club.

Steven Gregory enhances the painterly quality of his photographic landscapes with heightened colors, digitally added, that give a slightly lurid sheen to the aging shacks and demolished mobile homes to which he also gives a noble monumentality with a wide-angle lens.

The ghosts of abstract expressionism linger around thickly encrusted panels by Paula Cruz, or maybe they shout from the dense swirls and protruding blobs of red and black that combine an agonized private calligraphy with suggestive sexuality. The pleasure of interpretation and discovery a viewer can have in looking at challenging work such as Cruz's is mitigated by an adjacent artist's statement that tells me far more than I want to know about her inner life and feelings about things in general. That is true of most wall texts in "Counterpoint."

Many artists' statements, especially those of younger artists, are pretentious or naively idealistic (common thesis: I think art, especially my art, can help save the world).

I wish it could.

Context and explanation are good. Rambling stream-of-consciousness paragraphs are not. Curators are responsible for editing art and accompanying material, including wall labels. Someone, please, take a firmer hand.

But that can't be my last word on Project Creo, a fine young venue committed to introducing thought-provoking contemporary art. It's a quibble, a minor stumble, nothing more.

Lennie Bennett can be reached at 727 893-8293 or lennie@sptimes.com

"Counterpoint" is at Project Creo Center for Art and Design, on the third floor of the Pier, 800 Second Ave. NE, St. Petersburg, through July 27. Gallery hours are 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Wednesday through Friday, noon to 8 p.m. Saturday and noon to 6 p.m. Sunday. 727 898-8318 or www.projectcreo.com

[Last modified June 22, 2005, 10:44:04]