In person, artist Janine Awai echoes her numbered paintings: neatly composed and elegant in a down-to-earth sort of way, faintly mysterious but expressive on exploration. As we perch on little modernist couches at Tempus Projects, Awai explains that we’re sitting amid her first exhibition in at least a decade — a solo show, titled Supersubsurface, of 21 14-inch square paintings, which flip between abstraction and representation and combine drawing, collage, photo transfer and other techniques.
Though Awai rarely exhibits, she’s one of Tampa’s most deeply rooted artists, an original member of longtime artist collective Experimental Skeleton and the co-owner of a Seminole Heights design studio called LiveWork with her husband, Devon Brady, an artist and a Hillsborough County firefighter, and artist-architect Mike LeMieux.
For about an hour, Awai and I play interview cat-and-mouse. I lead her around from painting to painting, asking “What’s going on here?” out of sheer curiosity. Awai hedges over how much to disclose; she’s the kind of artist who wants you to take a hint from the canvas and go deep, charting your own course. So perhaps story is a better way than description to respond to her work.
1. Under a telephone pole halfway down a city block, a woman notices that the air has changed and that its woody scent and flat gray light spell fall. But what has transformed — a molecule or a season? For a moment the sky overhead turns fibrous and white as the shadows of scattering leaves animate its calm surface like a sketch.
2. On the horizon an ideal city partly in ruins rises from the grass. The spine of one low, horizontal building arcs up from the ground like an animal’s humped back, revealing a flank braced by narrow columns. We rebuild our insides outside, she thinks, rubbing a chicken bone into the dirt with the toe of her boot.
3. Hexagonal tiles, slate on white, signal some colonial heritage, Spanish tinged with Arabic. On a table above, a fan of wedges of crisp golden bread turn out on a plate. She bites the corner off one piece and feels it crumble and moisten in her mouth, absorbing into her body. Into the tumbleweeds of invisible mechanics.
Other pieces in the series push the theme toward science, but always via poetry. A thick covering of waxy blue-and-white barnacles covers one square, also suggesting a cascade of blooming flowers or, as Awai intends, scaling skin. Another juxtaposes a geometric map of an insect swarm with a delicate drawing of cocoons, life observed at macro and micro scales.
“Certain patterns and structures seem to repeat so much in nature, and we emulate a lot of that in our lives, in building systems or even just things we seem to be attracted to,” Awai says. “I look at the relationship between people and all these natural patterns.”
Awai’s attraction to the gap between art and science recalls the group aesthetic of Experimental Skeleton, which she founded along with Joe Griffith, Kym O’Donnell, Brian Taylor and other artists after graduating from USF in 1995. Originally from Trinidad, Awai followed an older sister to Tampa and USF to study art. (The sister, Nikki, also an artist, now lives in New York.) Awai found herself drawn to printmaking under the tutelage of professor Bradlee Shanks (who still oversees the print studio at USF’s art department) and the discipline’s attention to detail and draftsmanship. Later she studied library science but got sidetracked from becoming an archivist after her son, Miles, now 7, was born and husband Brady joined fire rescue. In 2012, the couple purchased the Seminole Heights building where LiveWork resides, near clients including Angry Chair (where the taproom was designed by Awai, Brady and LeMieux) and Fodder and Shine (where the sculpted wood bar was a LiveWork project).
Years later, Awai says, the complexity of printmaking — its marriage of technical know-how and strong ideas — still serves as a guiding light for her output across media.
“Printmaking makes you really want it because you have to work for it, so it’s kind of a philosophical state of mind,” Awai says.
Janine Awai: Supersubsurface
Runs through June 26, Tempus Projects, 4636 N. Florida Ave., Tampa, tempus-projects.com
Show will be open first Friday Seminole Heights on Fri., June 5, 7-10 p.m. facebook.com/ffseminoleheights
