The Arts Center launches four exhibitions, squeezing them alongside two shows of student art. The talent is ample, if the quarters are not.
By LENNIE BENNETT, Times art critic
Published October 20, 2005
[Times photo: Images from the Arts Center]
Edgar Sanchez Cumbas, Protector II, 2005, oil and acrylic on panel.
Thomas Murray, The List, 2005, oil on canvas.
Melissa Christiano, Habitat, 2005, kallitype with assemblage.
ST. PETERSBURG - Okay, we are now thoroughly convinced that the Arts Center needs more room and everyone should pony up with a donation to make its planned, glamorous expansion happen. In the Arts Center's current, inadequate location, four exhibitions of professional artists are scrunched together along with two shows of student art. "Uncle!" cries the chorus. Or, "Go west!" (One block to the proposed new site.)
Actually, I exaggerate the situation's direness, but the ambitiousness of the center's exhibition schedule in limited quarters is indicative of how it could really cut loose given more square feet.
You are greeted by Edgar Sanchez Cumbas' studies of ambiguous, monkish men, and that ambiguity continues through the four disparate shows.
Cumbas' paintings have the same element of mystery that imbues those of the late Leslie Lerner, an artist I greatly admired. Cumbas' paintings focus on these ascetic creatures who seem almost of another world, partly because he isolates them on spare, heavily painted panels of nuanced beauty. Most are poised in a voidlike space, balancing between heaven and Earth on small patches that look like mountainous landscapes.
Cumbas' work is arranged in a gallery with Donna Gordon's sculptures. Two of them, a clay vessel and bronze wall piece, are an inventory of small faces, a Dante-esque crowd of humanity. A group of nine clay circles is part of a larger series containing female figures in various life stages.
Remember the famous song from the musical Rent, in which the question was asked: How do you measure a year? Mixed media artist Melissa Christiano uses visceral mementos to mark the passage of time: fingernail clippings, snippets of hair, extracted teeth, for example, lined up under glass, sometimes in tiny vials, tucked preciously into boxes. Accompanying them are kallitypes, an arcane photographic process that yields sepia-toned prints. All show a torso centered on a grid like a shooting gallery target. Into them she sometimes embeds more raw materials: a dead bird or nest, cages and other cryptic objects. A video centers on the torso, painted on a gallery wall, onto which silhouettes of birds are projected. A clue to the meaning of these works, which act as an installation, is in her artist's statement recalling the bird traps her grandparents would make to occupy her and the hours she spent waiting to pull the string on the trap door.
Chris Scarborough's photographic portraits exaggerate his subjects' features, mostly their eyes, in an attempt to approximate characters in Japanese anime cartoons. He writes, "We are preconditioned to believe that a photograph tells the truth." I don't know that I agree with that. Most people understand the concept of airbrushing or computer manipulation, at the least.
The least cohesive group belongs to Thomas Murray, a talented painter whose work looks artificially forced into a theme show titled "Name, Mine." It describes mostly one collection of works on paper, Jesus 1-12, portraits of people with that name mingled with schematic drawings that suggest conceptual interpretations of the idea of Jesus, a tug between person and theory. The other paintings just don't seem to make a thematic point, good though they are. It's a sometimes unfortunate truth that artists are often boxed in by curators trying to package a Big Idea. Maybe they should just be allowed on occasion to hang their work on the wall.
The overall point, though, is all art has something to tell and teach us. Thanks for that.
PREVIEW: "From the Ground Up: Donna Gordon and Edgar Sanchez Cumbas," "Melissa Christiano: Run for Your Life," "Chris Scarborough: This Was Better Than Real Life" and "Thomas Murray: Name, Mine" are at the Arts Center, 719 Central Ave., St. Petersburg, through Oct. 30. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday and noon to 4 p.m. Sunday. Free admission. (727) 822-7872.
