Daily Loaf

Because it’s hard to know these days whether to be cautiously optimistic that the recession might be ending or terrified that nobody knows what will happen next, contemplating Florida’s place in the economic (and, increasingly, environmental) miasma is a harrowing exercise.

Artist Michael Parker has his own vision of the state’s fate, as expressed in a composite of digital photographs (”The Final Battle,” right): two toddlers, each sunk ankle-deep into cement, seeming to lunge toward each other in a grappling contest, set against a slightly surreal landscape of swirling clouds and an ominously looming tree.

The picture — simultaneously laugh-out-loud funny and disturbing — conveys in a nutshell for curator Manuel Lopez what the exhibit Slow Death of a Flamingo is about.

Inspired by a sense that the Sunshine State (a.k.a., the “Ponzi State,” following George Packer’s February New Yorker article about Florida home foreclosures) is on its way to hell in a handbasket, the exhibit was originally slated to go on view at Flight 19 much earlier this year. But after that venue — an alternative space once supported by a below-market-rate lease from the City of Tampa — closed permanently (a casualty of financial troubles), the show found its way to Hillsborough Community College’s Ybor Campus art gallery. By late July, when Slow Death opened in time to intersect with a new economic ambivalence, the shifting zeitgeist seemed more apropos than ever to the exhibit’s oblique approach — more meditative than diagnostic — to a complex situation.

“The intention of the show was not to convey the facts, the reality, but to ask ‘Where do you think we’re heading?’” Lopez says.

For the most part, works in the exhibit don’t offer anything like a literal answer to that question. (Perhaps the most “optimistic” are Conor King’s panoramic digital prints of two pre-adolescent children at play; despite their presumed innocence, the pair’s adventures — exploring an aquarium and climbing a rock wall — assume the gravity, even faint melancholy, of an adult undertaking, a reminder that the “next generation” will somehow metaphorically spelunk their way out of this mess.) Instead, many of the works on view seem to take a kind of perverse pleasure — one easy to share — in reflecting the state of our State.

For me, the most successful example (and probably the most impressive piece in the show, in scope of vision and craft) is Ivan Reyes Garcia’s “Modelo (Model).” The 7-by-6-foot metal sculpture mimics the form of a plastic car model kit — numbered auto accessories attached by tabs to a welded grid, just waiting to be popped off and affixed onto a hyper-masculine “ride” (as in, pimp my). Hubcaps, tailpipes, mud flap girls and even a dainty pair of glass truck balls invite man-boy fantasies from viewers of either gender. There’s irony, needless to say, in this gorgeous, outrageously fetishized object and its interrelated associations with environmental destruction (by way of low mileage vehicles and generalized car attachment syndrome), consumerism and the commercialization of “manliness.” (My only complaint is that the piece clearly wants to be mounted upright — surely a difficult, wall-destroying task — but sits on the gallery floor for this showing.)

Less conceptually nuanced but just as striking for their formal beauty, Laszlo Horvath’s black-and-white photographs (”Powerlines,” right) depict electric power lines as austerely beautiful silhouettes divorced from their environmental context. Anyone familiar with Horvath’s work (perhaps via the annual Gasparilla Festival of the Arts or visits to the West Tampa Center for the Arts, where he has long kept a studio) may do a double take; for the moment, his customary gothic self-portraiture has been replaced by a cool-headed investigation of line and two-dimensional space. Cosme Herrera, a Tampa native who lives and works in Brooklyn, takes a similarly pared-down approach, rendering landscapes in black or beige vinyl wood grain on smooth white polypropylene paper. Poignantly lovely and more than a bit sad, the vistas of leafless trees and stumps channel death more than life. (In contrast, Herrera’s last exhibition in Tampa featured colorful landscapes populated with people.)

Other fantastically talented and locally based artists — Edgar Sanchez-Cumbas, Maria Emilia, Sean Erwin — are represented in the exhibition. All except Erwin and King are part of a stable of artists Lopez promotes under the heading of Paula Ysom Group. Plans were once afoot to find a traditional gallery space for the group, which is named for one of its start-up investors, but Lopez says he’s happy for the moment organizing the occasional show where there’s a willing venue to host. (In the meantime, he says, the group’s website gets a healthy influx of international traffic.) Perhaps once the economy turns around, that’ll change — just like everything else in sunny Florida.

Posted in Arts & Entertainment | Leave a comment