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Art

Lasting impressions

Installation art is a temporary medium, and a thought-provoking Tampa exhibition demands to be seen - now.

By LENNIE BENNETT
Published February 9, 2006

	[Times photo: Bob Croslin]
	Jason Roderick, Remind Me, mixed media, 2005.

TAMPA - As much as we try to halt its decomposition, art, like everything from human hands, is impermanent. Paint cracks and separates from canvas. Metal and marble pit. Photographs fade and fabric tears.

Unlike other mediums, installation art celebrates change. It goes up. It comes down. It moves to a different venue and is reconfigured to fit that space. The materials, often chosen for their mutability, deteriorate purposefully over time or before our eyes. It's probably the most noncommercial art form, even more than video art, usually requiring a lot of dedicated space that makes it impractical for most private or institutional collections.

And that ephemeral quality is what makes installation art worth seeing here and now because soon it's gone.

In "The Other Worlds," Flight 19 Gallery presents us with five fine examples of the genre, conceived with such clarity that they can be easily grasped, even by viewers uncomfortable with art they consider nontraditional. All begin with personal associations onto which we can tack our own, creating layers of ideas that become narratives.

The space is ideal for installations, a cavernous room with a concrete floor and bare brick walls that was once the baggage area for the historic Union Train Station (now a bus depot) minutes from downtown Tampa. Curator Joe Griffith arranged four of the works in that room; a fifth, 3rd Floor by Boston sculptor Erick Thomas, occupies a smaller adjacent gallery.

Thomas' installation at first glance resembles a Home Depot display pushing construction products. A shingled pitched roof sits on the floor as if blown off its base by some force of nature. We approach in the darkened gallery and have to walk into around to reach a small double door that offers a glimpse inside. It's a dimly lit attic through which a swarm of hammerhead sharks, carved from foam, swim, a startling discovery in a banal setting. In real attics, we cram all that stuff we don't need but refuse to discard. Here, a meticulously constructed attic is a conceptual repository, storage for subliminal or deferred thoughts. You can make something or nothing of the sharks. Use your imagination.

Enee Abelman's In My Father's House is a memoir, and unlike recent, notorious literary examples, acknowledges the ambiguity of memory and the way perception alters and bends it. She uses three components: an assemblage of folded white dress shirts, a video projection of the shirts being folded as a men's choir sings, and photos of more shirts, rumpled this time, montaged into the image of the Swiss flag printed on vinyl.

You first wonder, "Huh?"

Before you know Abelman's story in creating it, simply appreciate this meditation on shirtness. They present themselves with formality, 54 of them neatly folded and arranged in a grid on the floor. No. 55 is hung alone on a wall. The formality is compromised, a little, by the disarray of the collaged close-up photographs. But they, too, are cropped into neat squares and arranged in a grid, tinted white or red.

Today men have many sartorial choices but the starched white broadcloth dress shirt remains a symbol of the professional male, conservative and always correct. In the video, the artist, standing in an old church, lovingly takes each from its hanger and folds it, turning an act of drudgery into a ritualized performance. The sacred-sounding chorale reinforces the ceremonial nature of the act. Finally, she removes the shirt she's wearing and folds it, too.

In its entirety, it seems to be honoring everyday rhythms and conventions. Knowing that Abelman created it in memory of her father, a Swiss-born banker who died when she was 6 and he was approaching 55, deepens our appreciation. The music is the only recording she has of his voice, taped when he performed as a member of a male choir. The wrinkled shirts comprising the flag belong to her eldest son who was packing for college when she created In My Father's House in 2001. Love and loss, messy details and all.

Knowing the back story of Maria Emilia's Que Me Quiten Lo Bailado (a Cuban saying translated as "you can't take away the dance") also makes it more meaningful, though like Abelman's piece, it can be appreciated for its formal beauty alone. Originally conceived as two separate works, an apartment window and large white silk quilt have been combined for this show. (Remember, installations are always changing.) Emilia is a good friend so I can't make critical judgments of her art but I can explain it as I see it.

Ana Mendieta was a prominent artist and friend of Emilia's who died in 1985 after falling from her high-rise New York apartment. Her husband, the artist Carl Andre, was tried and acquitted, but many have continued to questioned whether she jumped or was pushed. Emilia allows us to form our own opinion in recreating that apartment window with the radiator that stood below it. When Lo Bailado was first shown, viewers were invited to attempt their own jump through the window, which, as Emilia pointed out in her recreation, is nearly impossible without a big hoist from another person. She also hung, in its first incarnation, a pink sequined dress that belonged to Mendieta. It has since fallen apart, so a new gold dress hangs just beyond the window, a surviving fragment of Mendieta's pinned to it as a relic. The sequins are metaphorical mirrors, silent witnesses to the truth.

Nearby, like baffling, is the quilt, with poufed square panels containing note cards with the artist's musings. (You can't read them.) In this context, random objects of comfort and renewal - warmth, fresh air, swaddling - are united as receptacles of secrets.

Black balloons float with a satisfying symmetry in Jason Roderick's Remind Me. Each is stenciled with a hand bearing a scrawled message. Roderick says he always writes reminders to himself on the back of his hand so this work represents his version of Post-it notes. And, sooner rather than later, the balloons will slowly deflate, making the reminders illegible. More memory and forgetting.

No deep thoughts pervade Marie Yoho Dorsey's silk flowers dipped in beeswax and strung from ceiling to floor with lyrical irregularity. Their encaustic coating works at ironic cross purpose. Why add a preservative layer these fakes don't need? And yet, the fragrance it gives the odorless blooms mimics reality, fooling bees who are lured through the gallery's open door and buzz around them, a lovely, unplanned serendipity and an olfactory version of trompe l'oeil.

If you're looking for a self-guided course in Installations 101, you won't find better teachers than these.

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

"The Other Worlds" is at Flight 19 Gallery, 601 N Nebraska Ave., Tampa, through March 11. Gallery hours are 7 to 10 p.m. Saturday or by appointment. For information, call (813) 247-2030.

[Last modified February 8, 2006, 09:04:06]