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Art

Pieces of the past

An installation at the Arts Center is a thought-provoking homage to hardworking women. It joins two other new exhibitions at the center.

By LENNIE BENNETT
Published September 24, 2006

ST. PETERSBURG

Thanks to disgraced writer James Frey, we all know how a memoir can explode into a million little fictional pieces.

The visual artist has more wiggle room than a writer does in presenting the past. The assumption is that memory is interpretive, selective and manipulated by the artist’s hand and vision. So it is with Virginia Beth Shields , whose installation at the Arts Center invokes her roots in South Carolina’s Cherokee Foothills. Remnants is an homage to the women who worked as sharecroppers and in timber mills while living in grinding poverty, bearing and rearing children, cooking and cleaning while they eked out a below-subsistence living.

Shields gives these women’s lives dignity, even beauty, in her treatment. Three small houses are constructed as frames for large, backlit black-and-white photographs of interiors and exteriors of real houses that seem not much larger than these ersatz ones. Scattered around are mounds of seed cotton. Columns evoke plantation life, some wrapped with scraps of denim, calico and burlap. Nearby, an old iron bed is fitted with a mattress spilling straw, its smell a sensory element of the installation. On the nightstand, a book is stuffed with typed reminiscences of women’s lives in the 1930s and 1940s, powerful testimonials to lives both simple and complicated.

The mixed media work has a straightforward message without layers of metaphor. It’s like those bronze statues honoring anonymous workers, soldiers and immigrants, cast in realistic poses. Much installation art can be so obscure, requiring codes to decipher it. Art should make us think and see in new ways, but it should not require a concordance.

On the other hand, good art requires a certain level of technical competence and originality. The 14th annual All Florida Juried Exhibition, also at the Arts Center, is a disappointment. I don’t know what Donald Kuspit , a distinguished critic and writer who juried the show, had to choose from, but this exhibition does not reflect the depth of talent working in Florida right now. It has the feel of a members’ show in which everyone is guaranteed a place on the wall — an important and vital opportunity that the Arts Center should and does offer twice a year. This is billed as a more exclusive invitational.

Kuspit makes clear in his juror’s statement his bias toward representational art, which he believes is far more vital these days. He also endorses art that has, as he says, human interest. It’s a good thing to recognize artists who paint a scene without irony or angst, to value sincerity rather than deride it as sentimentality. Seeing that philosophy validated and embodied is probably the best that can be said about this show overall.

Bridging these two exhibitions, philosophically and physically, is “Tomorrow’s Drawing Today,” an eccentric, eclectic and gratifying show curated by Sandy Besser , a well-known collector who lives in Santa Fe, N.M.

Like Kuspit, Besser is drawn to the figurative (excuse the pun). He pushes the definition of drawing beyond the conventional idea of graphite or chalk on paper, used in the past to create studies for finished work in paint or stone.

Some of the drawings have the look of a study, though, such as Bart Johnson’s  Tiepolo Honey, with its seemingly unrelated, bizarre figures, such as Bosch encountering Dr. Seuss. And there are other examples of fantastical characters from other artists, part of a movement in contemporary drawing that combines whimsy with nightmare.

Also represented is another continuing trend, born in the 20th century, of art that is deliberately crude technically, a rejection of slickness, such as Richard Kurtz’s  boxers drawn on NRA target practice paper and Lauren Ari’s  Time for Tigers Timbre, which uses a dictionary page as a canvas, and clay figures to punctuate the drawings.

Works such as these will probably elicit the inevitable comment from some viewers about their “looking like something my grandchildren would do.” Well, okay, but consider what the artist is trying to convey with this purposefully simple style, used tongue-in-cheek, even cynically.

Traditionalists will find easy-on-the-eyes beauty here, too, in Tamie Beldue’s  contemplative nude and Alice Leora Briggs’  Annunciation II, a drawing incised on a clay tablet like an etching.

There are other fine examples of drawing and all its possibilities, but the standout is Craig Atteberry’s  exquisite, minute head of a man centered on a large sheet of handmade paper. It’s precious and extravagant.

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

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REVIEW: "Virginia Beth Shields: Remnants" and "On Becoming" are at the Arts Center, 719 Central Ave., St. Petersburg, through Oct. 29. Also on view are "Tomorrow's Drawing Today" and the 14th annual All Florida Juried Exhibition, both through Oct. 29. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Saturday and noon to 4 p.m. Sunday. Free admission. (727) 822-7872.

[Last modified September 22, 2006, 09:52:40]