St. Pete’s June 2023 Art Walk

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Ceramic Art, Drawing, Florida Art Shows, Mixed Media, Painting / Painters, Pinellas County, Printmaking, Sculptors / Sculpture, St. Pete
Jun 162023
 

There was a lot to see at last Saturday’s ArtWalk in St. Pete, Florida. Below is a brief roundup. Many of these artists and exhibitions can also be seen for the rest of the month (if not longer).

Above is ceramic work by Rebecca Stevens from her exhibition, The Good Life, at Morean Center for Clay. Her work is influenced by her experience as a ballet dancer, ancient Greek art, and by Art Nouveau.

Soft Water Gallery, part of the Arts Xchange in the Warehouse District is showing Abstract Visions, work by Steph Gimson.

Tommy Bayot’s exhibition Lines is on view at The Factory St. Pete, part of their Pride Month celebrations. The show will be on view until 7/2/23 and includes a variety of work, in addition to the abstract pieces below. Check out his Instagram for more.

The ArtLofts are located above Florida CraftArt Gallery and are currently showing John Gascot’s Sweet Boys.

John Gascot, “Underwater Romance”

The space also contains 19 artist studios. Below are works from two of the many artists.

Christine Di Staola’s “Atlas Compass 2” and “Atlas Compass 3”

Work by Mavis Gibson

The next ArtWalk in St. Pete will be on July 8th (second Saturday of the month).

 

 

Vancouver Art Shows- Ben Reeves at Equinox Gallery 2018

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Canadian Art Shows, Collage, Painting / Painters, Vancouver
Jun 152023
 

“Lynn Valley Days II”, 2018, Oil, acrylic and canvas on burlap

“Late Summer”, 2018, Oil on burlap with acrylic on canvas collage

Three paintings from Ben Reeves’ 2018 exhibition Something Edge at Equinox Gallery in Vancouver. The textures from the layers of paint and canvas, as well as his use of color, create lush dreamlike environments.

From the press release-

Ben Reeves’ artistic practice is a way of exploring and learning about the world as well as a material and intellectual pursuit that unfurls not only new understandings about perception but an equal amount of uncertainty, which in turn fuels further curiosity.

Ruminating on his current series of works, Reeves explains: “These paintings are views from one space, looking into another. I equate this with how experiences are always made up of multiple realities, multiple spaces. For example, the present is always haunted by the past. When I think back to my childhood, growing up here on the West Coast, I realize that it was both the place I thought it was and it wasn’t. I didn’t know that the place I grew up in both was and wasn’t itself.” How, then, does an artist begin to address the layered histories embedded in the land?

In most of Reeves’s paintings, a view is projected from high ground (perhaps a North Shore mountaintop), through a tactile forest (perhaps in Lynn Valley), or toward sights of orderly urban vistas in the distance (perhaps Vancouver). The passage from one space to the other is accentuated by a tangle of vines or hanging branches made of cut canvas, which is collaged directly onto the burlap ground of the painting, partially impeding the view forward. These physical “veils” are staunch reminders of that which hovers behind and within, stalling the viewer in the web of the here and now of the foreground, while the coloured glimmer of an unknown future beckons in the distance. This tension between what is known and what is not, between the fleeting images of memory and the starkness of reality, finds its parallel in paint that is directed with great dexterity by an artist whose multifaceted handling of the medium—as it is blotted, dabbed, and dragged—grows increasingly sophisticated at each reveal.

These works also include the unexpected arrival of the human form. While subdued and somewhat abstracted, figures are seen wading at the seashore or swimming at night in the depths of a wide ocean. Disrupting the Western tradition of horizontality to represent a landscape, Reeves’s incongruously vertical canvases compress the scene from the sides. In works where the horizon is visible, he accentuates this faraway perimeter of the world with a horizontal line placed uncannily near the top of the painting, bringing this unknown edge seemingly closer, opening up possibilities for the scrutiny of infinity or other idealized archetypes. These and other places within Reeves’s paintings can be viewed as “something edge”: locations or thoughts that lie both within and beyond our conception.

Tampa Art Shows- Salman Toor’s “No Ordinary Love” at Tampa Museum of Art

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Drawing, Florida Art Shows, Painting / Painters, Tampa
Jun 102023
 

“Three Friends in a Cab”, 2021, Oil on panel

Salman Toor’s recent exhibition, No Ordinary Love, at Tampa Museum of Art consists of over 45 paintings and drawings, split into three themes- Family, Desire, and Tradition. It’s a really impressive show with work that combines art history references with personal narrative to create fascinating paintings.

The works in the “Family” section are intimate and sometimes picture the artist as more as an observer and less of a participant, like in Mommy, pictured below.

“Mommy”, 2021, Oil on canvas

“Mommy”, 2021, detail

His personal history, as both a queer artist and a Pakistani-born American, can be seen and felt throughout the exhibition. Pictured below, Back Lawn, references the Mughal tradition of garden scenes, with multiple actions happening at the same time.

“Back Lawn”, 2021, Oil on canvas

“Back Lawn”, 2021, detail

“Back Lawn”, detail

Walking Together feels more personal, especially with the main figure looking directly at the viewer. It’s easy to imagine the child from Mommy, now an adult, still looking for his place in the world.

From the museum’s wall description-

Three men are seen in the middle of a crowded room. In the center of the painting, a man in a white shirt with black dots is being escorted by his companion. However, this central figure holds hands with another man, whose historical costume recalls that of a European court jester, adding a sense of absurdity and mystery to the scene.

The linking of these three figures hints at both an attraction and a clash between past and present, between European cultures and those of the South Asian diaspora. In this composition, Toor seems to suggest the precarity of queer desire and the anxieties of those who exist between worlds.

“Walking Together”, 2019, oil on panel

Art historical themes appear again in Museum Boys, with the inclusion of representations of European art.

“Museum Boys”, 2021, oil on panel

“Museum Boys”, 2021, detail

A few paintings also focus on the danger and fear of persecution that concerns Toor, present in work like Night Capture.

“Night Capture”, 2021, oil on panel

It was hard to select which work to highlight- there were so many pieces deserving of contemplation and discussion. It will be exciting to see what Toor creates going forward.

This exhibition closed in Tampa on 6/4. It moves on to the Honolulu Museum of Art from July through October of 2023 and then continues on to the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University in Massachusetts on November 16th running until February 11th of 2024.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tampa Art Shows- Parachute Gallery- “Buy Me Flowers & Call Me Pretty”

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Ceramic Art, Florida Art Shows, Mixed Media, Painting / Painters, Photographers / Photography, Tampa
Jun 102023
 

Ketsy Ruiz, “El Yunque in my Corazón I and II”, acrylic on canvas

Work by (L to R)- Chloe Lewis, Kyra Connolly, Ketsy Ruiz. and Joerod Collier

Photos by Joerod Collier, Ceramics by Babette Herschberger

Currently on view at Parachute Gallery in Ybor City, Tampa, is the group exhibition Buy Me Flowers & Call Me Pretty. The show celebrates the beauty of nature and features seven artists with Florida roots.

The artists included are-

This show is on view until 6/25/23.

 

Tampa Art Shows- Gigi Lage at Tempus Volta in Ybor City

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Florida Art Shows, Photographers / Photography, Tampa
Jun 092023
 

Tempus Volta, one of Tempus Projects’ spaces in the Ybor Kress building in Tampa, is currently showing Gigi Lage’s solo exhibition, Exposure Garden.

From the gallery’s website-

Lage uses generative AI as a tool to construct still frames from the artist’s own text input. Lage examines how AI processes its learning patterns from existing data and how its output defines the image, its deranged textures, and the story found within the frame. This work explores themes surrounding the implication of replication, the complexities of a single image, and a machine’s relationship to our natural world.

Exposure Garden uncovers the disturbances between AI-generated realities and our human experiences through the exploration of human life in natural elements as processed by machines. Lage explores the simulation of human connection as re-imagined video stills & film negatives. These extractions of images romanticize a version of our world in a dream-like state; through another type of mind that may or may not be our own.

This show will be up until 6/15/23.

Florida Art Shows- St. Pete Month of Photography- 2023 Photo Laureate

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Florida Art Shows, Photographers / Photography, Pinellas County, St. Pete
May 272023
 

Jaime Aelavanthara, “Cicada Calling “and “Ribs”

As part of St. Pete Month of Photography (SPMOP), Morean Arts Center is showing Photo Laureate 2023: The Nominees.

For more on the five nominees, below are links to their websites and an example from their personal websites of their work.

Jaime Aelavanthara (see first image above)- website and Instagram

Selina Román– website and Instagram

Selina Román “Refusal to Unpack”, 2020, image from her website

Emily Will– website and Instagram

Emily Will- “Saint Petersburg, Russia”, image from her website

Tristan Wheelock– website and Instagram

Tristan Wheelock- “NASCAR Family”, 2014, image from his website

Thomas Sayers-Ellis became the winning finalist and will be the Photo Laureate this year. The 2023 Photo Laureate will create an historical document of events, people and places of Tampa Bay for the next twelve months. The results of this project will be shown next year in a solo exhibition.

Thomas Sayers-Ellis, “The Mirror in Uncle Tom’s Camera”, 2011 image from his Instagram

The best place to see his photography is on his Instagram.

The photo exhibition will be on view until 6/30/23.

 

 

Florida Art Shows- Dunedin City Hall Grand Opening

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Ceramic Art, Collage, Conceptual Art, Dunedin, Fiber Arts, Florida Art Shows, Installation Art, Mixed Media, Painting / Painters, Photographers / Photography, Public Art, Sculptors / Sculpture
May 242023
 

Rachel Ratcliff, “Roll of the Kaleidoscope”, 2021, acrylic on canvas

Richard Logan “Sea Oats”, 2022, photographic transfer on metal with etched glass

Steven Spathelf, “Orange Blossom”, 2022, acrylic on canvas

This past Friday the city of Dunedin, Florida, celebrated the opening of its new City Hall. As part of the celebration, the building and all of its offices were open to the public. It was the first opportunity to see all the wonderful art by Florida artists- selected and commissioned by Elizabeth Brincklow.

Pictured above are works by Rachel Ratcliff (wave painting) and Richard Logan (photography). The third work is by Steven Spathelf whose oranges can be seen adorning buildings and homes all around town.

Scroll through the pages below to see the other works on view.

NYC Art Shows- Dorian FitzGerald at Arsenal Contemporary

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
May 162023
 

“Salon, Apartment of Valerian Rybar and Jean-Francois Daigre, Rue du Bac, Paris”, 2015, acrylic paint, acrylic caulk, acrylic transfer, GAC 800 on canvas mounted on wood

“Salon, Apartment of Valerian Rybar and Jean-Francois Daigre, Rue du Bac, Paris”, 2015, (detail)

“Salon, Rue du Bac, Paris”, 2022, acrylic and acrylic caulking on canvas mounted on board

“Salon, Rue du Bac, Paris”, 2022, (detail)

“Aquarium (Taboo)”, 2019

“Aquarium (Taboo)”, 2019

Currently at Arsenal Contemporary are Dorian FitzGerald’s paintings for his exhibition Fitzcarraldo. The images above are a few of the larger paintings from the show. The works initially look like photographs, but on closer inspection you can see more of the process involved in their creation.

Below is a section from the press release that discusses FitzGerald’s work and the paintings pictured above. For more on the other works shown, including some of the smaller paintings, head to gallery’s website.

FitzGerald has spent the last two decades meticulously crafting a compelling, often monumental body of works, several of which have taken years to finish. His various lines of inquiry revolve around a central tenet: that the excesses, the follies, the deceptions and indulgences, the grand edifices, the opulence, the waste and plunder, the vanities, the subterfuges and the chummy pacts of the wealthy and the powerful, are all fodder for scrutiny. His subjects have ranged from the outdoor stage at the secretive Bohemian Grove during a production of Faust, a fake crown of costume jewelry made by the British to impress the King of Adra and help them facilitate their slave trade, to the staggering array of sunglasses collected by Elton John, to a vast aquarium stocked with black market fish. In this regard, FitzGerald has been compared to a contemporary court painter, albeit one who fully understands the paradox of using ostensibly beautiful works of art to deliver barbed comment on the very subjects he has so painstakingly rendered. FitzGerald’s large paintings are constructed with acrylic paint (and occasionally caulking) in a slow, precise method that the artist has refined in his studio over several years. The pre-process involves researching imagery, preparing it with custom software, making a large-scale acetate transfer onto canvas and then building up the paint slowly in a manner that resembles a kind of pointillism filtered through vector graphics. Both colour theory and the physical properties of paint, such as drying times and viscosity, are brought to bear in the setting of the final image. The infinite patience and granular attention to detail suggest a kinship with Tibetan sand painting. While the latter, once finished, is soon wiped away to drive home the impermanence of all things, FitzGerald’s works tend to hold a mirror up to that innately human wish to be exalted and remembered in the minds of others before the scythe comes down, as it inevitably does for queen, shepherd (and artist) alike.

Anchoring the exhibition is a pair of monumental paintings, both depicting a room in a Parisian apartment. Salon, Apartment of Valerian Rybar and Jean-François Daigre, Rue du Bac, Paris (2015) is the furnished version. Daigre and Rybar’s New York- and Paris-based firm Valerian Rybar & Daigre Design Corporation was renowned for providing the most lavish interior design and decorating for society doyennes from Miami Beach to Marakkesh in the 1970s and 1980s. It was closed following Rybar’s death in 1992. Their clients included Guy and Marie-Helene de Rothschild, Nicholas and Genevieve DuPont, Antenor and Beatriz Patino, Samuel and Mitzi Newhouse, Pierre and Sao Schlumberger, Sir James Goldsmith, Christina Onassis and Stavros Niarchos. They employed a host of artisans all over the world who did anything from paint Medieval tapestries on blank walls to create mother-of-pearl panels for a bathroom. They designed much of the furniture and rugs and were meticulous about the choice of fabrics, using opulent materials like satins trimmed with gold thread. The related painting, four years in the making, acts as a kind of coda. Salon, Rue de Bac, Paris (2022), depicts the same room after Rybar’s death, now an empty hall of mirrors en route to being dismantled. The searing band of red in the centre of the painting, glowing behind a door already off its hinges, is a peek into the molten bedroom that they had once kitted out like a Roman general’s tent.

Aquarium (Taboo) (2018), at 128” long and 40” high, was two years in the making. The painting shows a vibrant aquatic scene, with dazzling exotic fish and a mesmerizing array of coral. But the fish are black market, the coral has been pilfered, the 240-gallon tank is overcrowded with 53 specimens and the entire enterprise is kept alive by a complex system that is wholly unnatural and requires constant vigilance to prevent collapse. Of course, wild fish bound for the aquarium market must be caught alive and thus there exists an unsavoury network of divers who prowl the world’s reefs to find the most exotic and rare, often using cyanide spray to stun them (or inadvertently kill them if too much is used). The cyanide, when it settles on coral, soon kills that too.

This exhibition closes on 5/20/23.

NYC Art Shows- Marie Watt at Marc Straus

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, Collage, Conceptual Art, Fiber Arts, Installation Art, Mixed Media, New York Art Shows, Sculptors / Sculpture
May 122023
 

Currently at Marc Straus is Marie Watt’s impressive exhibition, Singing Everything.

From the press release-

A member of the Seneca Nation, Watt also has German-Scott ancestry. Her layered and complex influences include Indigenous knowledge and Iroquois proto-feminism, the matriarchal structures of certain Native American nations, the rise of social activism throughout the 20th century, and the anti-war and anti-hate content of the 1960s and 1970s music scene.

Central to the exhibition are three Sewing Circle pieces that were initiated at communal gatherings at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2022. Watt’s sewing circles are cross generational, multicultural gatherings that she has been organizing for over a decade. Inspired by poet laurate Joy Harjo’s (Mvskoke/Creek) poem Singing Everything, Watt collects words from the participants of her sewing circles with the prompt, “what do you want to sing a song for in this moment?” The submitted words are then embroidered or sewn onto patches of fabric during the sewing circle. For the Whitney Sewing Circle, with over 300 participants, Watt, for the first time, used all the submitted words. Each panel is patterned in a way that stays true to the original hand. She thinks of ones handwriting as an extension of the cadence of one’s voice and in this project, it becomes part of a larger chorus. By composing large-scale wall works from these pieces of fabric, Watt creates collaborative artworks that interweave many individual handwritings, touches, and the stories that were exchanged in a shared space.

When entering the gallery, the visitor is greeted by a sweeping, 24-foot-long neon sign spelling out the words “deer, skywalker, heron, bass, great lake, woodland, beaver, turtle, wolf, lowly, muskrat, rat” in various hues that evoke the sky on the horizon during sunset and sunrise. While the piece represents a new direction in Watt’s work, she views neon as an extension of beadwork. The glass itself is at once thread and bead, and both neon and beads have a relationship to trade. They both envelop light, color, and sound, embodying sunrises and sunsets on the horizon.

Two blanket towers, her signature sculptural works, appear in the show but now with tin bells or jingles added to the reclaimed wool blankets. This choice of added material felt like a natural extension to Watt. She writes: “Blankets are danced and so are jingles, there is something healing about them both. They are objects of comfort” – by way of touch or sound. “Jingles acknowledge the Jingle Dress Dance which began as a healing ritual in the Ojibwe tribe in the 1910s during the influenza pandemic. The Jingle Dress Dance was also a radical act. In 1883, the United States banned Indigenous ceremonial gatherings. Though the ban was repealed in 1978 with the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, during its century-long prohibition the Jingle Dress Dance was shared with other tribal communities. Today it is a pow-wow dance and continues to be associated with healing. The relevance of this dance extends beyond pandemics.” By including jingles Watt brings the potential of sound into her work, adding to their visual and tactile aspects.

While drawing from long craft traditions such as textile or glass work, Watt is expanding her work by including contemporary stories and both individual and collective experiences. Her primary interest is to think about art as more experiential, rather than only visual, a direction she plans to explore further.

This exhibition closes 5/20/23.

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