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Art

Currents of a culture

The conceptual works of a Project Creo exhibit are rooted in Southern traditions.

By LENNIE BENNETT
Published August 18, 2005

[Image courtesy of Project Creo

Jean Flint, Dream Fragments, 2001.

ST. PETERSBURG - "Tide to the Vernacular," Project Creo's current exhibition, is, like its title, a witty double-entendre.

Except for a few paintings, the art falls into that big catch-all bin we call conceptual. In a general way, the word means that the medium serves the idea rather than the traditional opposite. Most of the works are really more trains of thought than big ideas, which makes them more open to multiple interpretations.

The artists selected for the show by curator Melissa Christiano live in Memphis, Tennessee's largest city that sits on a bluff above the Mississippi River, source of its early growth. So that explains the "Tide" part of the show and the inference of being tied to a place. "Vernacular" refers to the way these artists interpret their Southern culture, sometimes in obvious ways but often not. They're about as far away from the Tennessee Williams' version of Southern Gothic as you can get.

The "Oh, wow" work that greets you as you step off the elevator onto the Pier's third floor is Rockers, a massive wood and paper sculpture by Greely Myatt. A rocking chair at least 10 feet tall is fused with a smaller one, a lovely take on the southern craft tradition that invokes associations with family, continuity and leisure time. His Rug is an optical illusion, a floor installation of broom sticks laid like the coils of a woven rag rug. It's positioned with mirrors that make it look much larger than it is. Its associations, like the rocking chairs, should be immediately apparent.

Niles Wallace also creates reference-laden sculptures with multiple meanings. A stack of wire cylinders connected by funnels brimming with salt looks like the baskets used for centuries to evaporate sea water and harvest the salt. Step back, and Pillars resembles a cascading fountain. His Temple is a symmetrical structure of recycled wood, serene as an ancient temple but closed and hermetic except for small holes bored into its surface.

Jeff Mickey's Spirit Boat is a multipart installation made of humble, ordinary objects associated with life in general as well as life on or near the water. Ladders are connected by a plank on which sits a white dinghy - high and dry - holding frosted bottles and dried gourds. It rests on solid ground while a few feet away, smaller ladderlike panels hung with a sail float like a winged boat, a stairway to heaven. Together they are a metaphor for the things that weight us down during life and the need to shed them if we want to ascend to higher ground, literally or spiritually.

For Dream Fragments, Jean Flint hung dozens of gauzy strips of plain fabric from a wire grid. You have to imagine that the sensation of walking through them (since we're not allowed to touch the art) would be like the mental filters that make our dreams so otherwordly.

After a lot of cerebration, Mikewindy's work is a lark. Two sculptures, Sunrise and Sunset, are positioned on the east and west sides of the glassed gallery space. Sunrise positions spritely painted light bulbs all in a row on a piece of wood, the way morning light spills over the horizon. The afternoon version plants the bulbs in a circle on a painted stool like the flameout of light and color as the sun goes down. Sometimes Mikewindy's titles are more clever than the works themselves. Carinne Says It Looks Like a Mother and Child But I Was Thinking More About Waves is a wood stump, maybe a cypress knee, painted in swirls of blue and green.

The exhibition features about two dozen two-dimensional works: paintings, drawings and photography. Pinkney Herbert's oils on canvas treat fire and water as elements spewing like geysers and maelstroms interrupted but never controlled by geometric forms that perhaps represent human intervention. They're painterly in a classic way, a departure from other works here, and gorgeously hued.

Tad Lauritzen Wright's idiom combines pop culture images and cartoonish characters. His paintings are based on grids or repetition of forms that give structure and discipline to what essentially are elaborate and well-done doodles. Beautiful Traffic Jam has hundreds of vehicles painted in naive fashion to look childlike, all connected by a black line that becomes a complex maze of interdependence and gridlock. Wind-up is a pun about the dual meaning of that term as Wright juxtaposes images of acceleration - a car salesman making a pitch, a girl jumping rope, a countdown - with those about endings - a woman crying, an address label.

Terri Jones' Plot, four graphite on vellum drawings, is a story about the passage of time told in the spare, elegant images of trees. Like all stories, and like the other art here, it has depths of meaning that she conveys with layers of paper that create shadowy, receding images - the back stories - along a horizon dotted with little squibs that could represent man-made dwellings. In the foreground, tree branches are laid out like corpses. It's hauntingly transcendent.

Mixed media panels by Don Estes are abstract landscapes, bands of modulated color that scroll through the seasons.

Dharanj Emanuel turns the theme of local connection around in his ennui-filled photographs. The artist, who is East Indian, is the protagonist in a series that reads like 19th century genre paintings of domestic life. He's in a sports bar, at an art gallery, on a golf course, watering the lawn of a suburban home and playing video games in a living room. In each, Emanuel is detached and disconnected from his surroundings and other people, a stranger in a strange land. The photographs are brilliantly lit like stage sets or renaissance paintings that give them an otherwordly glow.

Another type of genre scene plays out in Bobby Spillman's paintings. His domestic vernacular is based in a neighborhood in which empty birdhouses float among bare tree branches, along with bright bubbles of paint. A big bird (Big Bird as homeless sparrow) watches a family watching TV encased in its own bubble that the bird looks ready to burst with its beak.

"Tide to the Vernacular" is the final show Project Creo will have at its Pier location. As part of the Arts Center, the program, which promotes emerging artists and alternative art, will have larger gallery space in the center's new location. The new center, one block west of its current home at 719 Central Ave., is scheduled to open in January 2008. Until then, its curators will continue to organize smaller Project Creo exhibitions at the Arts Center. After "Tide" closes in October, the Arts Center will use the Pier space for its popular members shows, giving them more space and a wider audience.

For a swan song, this exhibition takes wing.

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

-- REVIEW: "Tide to the Vernacular" is at Project Creo, 800 Second Ave. NE on the third floor of the Pier in St. Petersburg, through Oct. 26. 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. Free admission. For information, call 727 898-8318 or go to www.projectcreo.org

[Last modified August 17, 2005, 12:53:06]