For years, Tampa-based artist collaborative Experimental Skeleton has wanted to do a project they call the The Silverfish Revolution. Named for the familiar creepy crawlers who inhabit piles of old books and magazines — the silverfish or Lepisma saccharina, an insect attracted to the starches in glue and paper — the project was initially conceived as a way to get rid of the group’s collection of old art magazines.
The idea was a massive collage that would remix images and text from the printed matter into a map, or snapshot, of the group’s collective conscience and unconscious — revealed through juxtapositions of symbols, snips of scissors and applications of paste.
“Collage is a great way to show somebody’s mind laid bare,” says Joe Griffith, an Experimental Skeleton founding member. “It’s a time capsule; it’s a mindset.”
For years, the project was shelved while the group had more pressing concerns. Until now.
Last Saturday, the Silverfish Revolution came to life at Tempus Projects gallery in Seminole Heights with a timely twist. Open to the public as well as Experimental Skeleton members, the collaborative collage has been re-envisioned as a response to the imminent Republican National Convention in Tampa. Visitors found one of the gallery’s walls covered with several 8-foot-tall fiberboard sheets — a base layer for the collage — and a worktable stocked with scissors and glue. Outside, the Bluebird Books Bus served as a library of old books and magazines available for taking and cutting up.
No instructions were given, but an invitation distributed in advance described the project as a participatory event designed to generate “a visual map of the current cultural and political mood made concrete and captured as a moment frozen in glue.”
By the end of the evening, a flock of gallery-goers had covered most of the boards with pasted words and images, building on the work of artists who had mailed in more than 60 collages to Experimental Skeleton beforehand. But their handiwork doesn’t spell the end of the Silverfish Revolution — its next stop, a second collage session before the RNC, takes place on Saturday at The Elephant in the Room, an exhibition organized by Tempus Projects and staged at CL Space.
How and where the Silverfish Revolution spreads (or not) from there remains an open question. Options, Griffith says, include cutting the collaged panels apart and storing them as a literal time capsule for future display. He also likes the idea of using segments of the collage as protest signs during the convention — or as signs of support, depending on what is collaged onto them. The project can be a platform for statements on either side of political divides and everywhere in between, Griffith explains.
“It’s actually a social experiment more than anything,” he says.
At the Aug. 18 event, participants embraced the open-ended potential of the project. Artist Mishou Sanchez sat at the Tempus worktable, crafting what looked like paper flames emerging from a photo of an airplane missing one wing. Grabbing a red crayon, she whipped out a lighter and began melting wax onto her collage before pasting onto a panel. The jet could be crashing or soaring, Sanchez said.
“I like making ambiguous kinds of imagery so that the viewer can make their own story,” she said.
Kathy Gibson, an art consultant, sat next to Sanchez piecing together photo fragments from magazines that symbolized her feelings about politics: an ear plugged with an earbud headphone as a sign for “no listening,” numbers and percent signs as stand-ins for statistics, and a picture of a prison cell as an allusion to social injustice.
“I’m starting to feel outrage as I think about what I’m putting together,” Gibson said.
While their contributions eschewed specifically partisan language, some of the artists who mailed in collages from outside of Tampa were more explicit. One artist operating under the pseudonym Lysander Dawson submitted a collage that reads “I’m Mitt Romney, I eat babies,” next to a creature composed of mixed-up body parts.
A highlight of the evening was the integration of Bluebird Books Bus into the project. Bus founder Mitzi Gordon stocked the roving bookstore-art-venue, which she parked outside of Tempus, with a hand-picked variety of books and magazines, mainly about politics and war, and pre-selected pages of illustrations for collage participants to use. Offerings included a box of anatomical flashcards, semi-vintage military picture books like a 1986 edition of Modern Naval Combat, and past issues of Armchair General magazine.
The event felt like a victory for Gordon, who created the bus — a short yellow school bus painted blueberry blue and lined with bookshelves — last year not only to sell books and promote writing and reading, but to encourage their overlap with visual arts.
“Finally, a night when the bus is devoted to paper arts,” Gordon said.
Tempus Projects director Tracy Midulla Reller was also glad that the project was as much a celebration of collage and community engagement as it was political.
“This was the right project for the RNC,” Midulla Reller says.
Check out its encore on Saturday at CL Space.
