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Under current, overview

A new height of sophistication

By LENNIE BENNETT
Published June 18, 2006

TAMPA-- “UnderCURRENT/overVIEW” is in its eighth year at the Tampa Museum of Art and has grown up. Its maturation is in large part due to a wise decision to expand its boundaries.

It was conceived in 1996 as a showcase for artists working in west-central Florida, but its last three exhibitions have been increasingly disappointing, maybe an indication that the talent pool in these parts isn’t as deep as we think. We’re still no Miami.

This year’s UnderCURRENT extended its boundaries statewide, and the result is a more sophisticated, broader slice of contemporary art. Jeffrey Grove , its juror, is also highly credentialed, the curator of modern and contemporary art at Atlanta’s High Museum. The exhibition’s random arrangement suggests  that he wasn’t looking for  themes, but several connections among much of the art emerge as you walk through the gallery.

Some of the strongest work comes from women. Their subjects are unapologetically domestic or feminine, as if announcing that the time has finally come when they don’t care about breaking down the doors of the men’s club. Thread, literally and metaphorically, strings much of it together.

Babs Reingold’s Skin No. 6 (from the “Intimate Apparel” series) is a bitter brew of tea-stained encaustic embedded with rust, human hair and thread. The wax acts as a burial ground for these discards, each a symbol of cyclical renewal, a tired theme she jolts to life with irony. Hair grows back, rusty things can be replaced, life can be stitched back together.

We have seen a lot of clothing fabricated by artists from material such as wire, suggesting a sort of bondage. M. Laine Wyatt  takes consumerism at face value with a jacket constructed of clothing sale tickets and photographic prints displaying the contents of a woman’s closet spread across a lawn.

The clotheshorse impulse, so often used as a measure of a woman’s self-worth, is interwoven with the quilting tradition, a symbol of comfort and security, by Latonya Hicks. Prayin’ Some Man Will Think I’m Pretty on a Dark Morning is a big circle skirt of appliqueed fabrics traced with hair extensions. It’s an interesting passive-aggressive kind of work about the tools a woman will use to attract a man and her reliance on such subterfuge and fakery.

Narratives, traditionally associated with figurative art, are finding new life and new definitions, if you think of a narrative as a “story” told in sequence that could be about an object rather than a person.

Joanna White’s Without is a good example. Delicate origami boxes, holes burned into them, are strung together like a long articulated chain. They snake to the floor like film cells stopped in time, their differences indiscernible without close inspection.

Lauren Garber’s Quietus I is another cerebral narrative, beautiful in its severity. It is composed of 33 square sheets covered with recurring shapes blurring and receding or clarified and sharp, drawings that resemble nothing but each other.

Michael Parker’s  landscapes about isolation and dislocation put him in the Edward Hopper tradition of storytelling, with a 21st century accent. People and animals are painted in surroundings having no context. Highway, cars and buildings exist on the flat color plane of the canvas, coming and going from nowhere. Edgar Sanchez Cumbas’  drawings have a different kind of mystery but share Parker’s isolationism.

Appropriation is still with us in its pop art version. Adept examples by James Michaels and David Williams, with their signature mix of commercial slickness and subtle nuance, are familiar and comfortable, though not illuminating.For many of the 30 artists, both men and women, beauty seems to be a conscious aesthetic choice as a formal element.

Marie Yoho Dorsey’s waxed threads dripping with silk flowers, seen in various other exhibitions recently, are obvious examples. So are her four vertical, Japanese-style etched landscapes, a collaboration between Dorsey and master printer Erika Schneider that Dorsey sticks with push pins and threads like a road map.

Reina Okawa  gets lovely results by layering frosted Mylar, painted and incised with cutouts of petals and butterflies. But there’s much beauty that is less overt. I’m thinking about David McKirdy’s elaborately obsessive painting of intersecting lines, so meticulous you think it has to be computer-generated.

There are a few exceptions to my classifications, those wonderful square pegs every good art survey needs.

Matthew Cox’s Why Is a Vulture Following Me? is a Rube Goldberg contraption of bicycle chains and gears that scroll a canvas between two cylinders. It’s drawn with what looks like a bird’s-eye view of the ground below. On one of the gears, a small vulture has been attached and circles in a smaller route than the canvas.

Robert Goldschmidt (with Edrex Fontanilla)  crafts a compelling video in the trompe l’oeil, or fool-the-eye, tradition but, like so much art here, with contemporary tweaks. As the focus and framing change, we become increasingly unclear about what we’re seeing (Leaves shimmering in sunlight? Rocks and dirt? Writhing bodies?) until we have no idea what we’re seeing.

Art seems more and more to be making that point: the primacy of the seen.

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

“underCURRENT/overVIEW 8” is at the Tampa Museum of Art, 600 N Ashley Drive, through July 9. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday. Admission is $8 for adults with discounts for others. (813) 274-8130.

[Last modified June 17, 2006, 11:41:19]