With the high drama of boldly colored and texturally rich oil paintings filling two galleries, one might think that Stacy Rosende's current exhibition at Scarfone/ Hartley Galleries is mostly about painting. Or is it?
There are also more than 50 of her small monoprints, some massed in one hallway and the rest spread across the upstairs gallery wall. Despite the sheer volume and seductive color of approximately 30 paintings, some of them quite large, I found myself drawn to prints that hold their own with a kind of lyricism or visual poetry. The artist's innovative print process employs various emulsions and up to 25 layers of stenciled or blocked-out motifs.
It's tempting to see this huge show as a contest between paint and print (I'm consciously ignoring the pod-like pottery that deflects attention from the stronger two-dimensional works). But it's not one medium against another; it's more of a psychological thing because a preference for powerfully expressive paint or works on paper also reveals our own state of mind. I've been told that paper is more immediate. For me it's generally the opposite.
And what of the artist's psychological imprint? Some of what she's tapping into, especially in the paintings, is her own history.
Since returning from graduate school at Boston University in 1996, Rosende — a University of Tampa alumnus and now professor at UT's Studio F — gained considerable local recognition for apocalyptic landscapes endowed (or burdened, depending on your point of view) with expressionist fervor and unsettling color. I suspected a case of over-assertive media heading into the troubled waters of the formulaic.
And it would seem that she'd reached a saturation point with this body of work, but Rosende's inclusion in Tampa Museum of Art's prestigious underCURRENT/ overVIEW for both 1997 and 2000 speaks of the impact of her painterly fields of destruction and benevolent assaults on nature. It also speaks to the inescapable issue of individual taste.
As for Rosende's doomsday message, it originated with her grandfather's legacy. A World War II photographer in the Pacific area, he "documented bombed landscapes." As a child she loved the way the photographs "create(d) the appearance of beauty within the aftermath of human tragedy and destruction. … " From this came her fascination with the dynamics of landscape and the regeneration of nature.
These childhood memories now resurface in abstractions, some with door-like forms engaging each other or seed pods tumbling across and sealing off geometric shapes. Here and there, passages of raw visceral color scraping color, gripping as in the exciting play between orange and red in "Torn." Two other standouts are the eerily illusive "Arbor" and "Lith," both solitary monumental tree trunks nearly floating away from their backgrounds when viewed from a distance. Significantly, these transitional works connect the earlier apocalyptic landscapes with the more poetic vision that Rosende delivers in the monoprints.
What unite the paintings are textural and calligraphic scrapings, scars in the Cy Twombly tradition, perfect for reviving distant battlegrounds. Yet, whether the artist generates raw energy on canvas or plays cerebral games with shallow space, the viewer remains on the outside.
By contrast, the monoprints hint of secrets and lure us into accessible little universes lit from within. Like their painterly counterparts, they're also texturally marked and scratched, though far less concerned with surface than with mini-internal struggles.
Fans of painterly abstraction should also view the Richard Protovin retrospective at St. Petersburg's 531 Central Fine Arts — easily the most elegant gallery in the Tampa Bay area (this is its best show, and the gallery has never looked better). The walls are covered with beautiful large abstracts and a few watercolors by Protovin (1945-91). Protovin was a St. Pete native and fine arts graduate of USF, where he studied with painter Mernet Larsen. An innovative animator, he also developed the NYU animation program. His paintings and films are in major national and private museum collections, including MoMA.
Protovin's canvases are a counterpoint to Rosende's. His are romantic and charged with atmospherically luminous color ("lush" says Professor Timothy Kennedy, a UT colleague in the painter's final years). Hers work through ideas and memories and recall a lineup of heroic abstract painters of the last century. All in all, these exhibitions provide a rare opportunity to review the dynamics of abstraction.
Flag Waiver We're reaffirming our patriotism, even displaying American flags with a fervor not seen in decades. But flags and their emotional residue have occupied one man's mind for some time. His conceptual installation, "Recoloration Proclamation Project" is the culmination of this thinking.
In 1997, John Sims was driving south from Connecticut. The artist, doctoral candidate in mathematics at Wesleyan College and professor of visual mathematics at the Ringling School of Art and Design was drawn by chance to the image of the Confederate flag.
His epiphany occurred at the most unlikely of places: the first gas station he came to in Florida. Stunned by a pickup truck with a Confederate flag bumper sticker, the Detroit native was later moved to convert his shock into art. With good reason: John Sims is an African-American.
Researching the historical Confederate flag and its transformations, the artist understood intuitively that the flag, for all its pretense at symbolizing the South, ignored the contributions of black slaves. That makes the symbol of the Old South essentially false. Whatever form the flag takes, for Sims it's an ongoing "symbol of terror."
He now challenges history and subverts the historical flag through redesign and "recoloration." At alternative Covivant Gallery and Studios, his conceptual exhibition features large fabricated flags, wall-hung or hanging from ropes, rooted in various Confederate predecessors. Some new designs sport black power colors of red, green and black; others are black or white or combinations of the two. Like most conceptual art, we enter innocent and emerge awakened to new realms of existence — or not.
But Sims is on to something. At a time when our American flag has become so precious, we might consider that its design is based on an American history minus the entire American Indian population.
Now working on Timesculpture, a large-scale public art project in New York City, Sims, convinced of art's ability to change attitudes, is planning a low-budget documentary film that continues the dialogue launched with flags. Also participating in Sims' conversation is New York quilt artist Lisa Sales. Her response to the project and Sept. 11 is a quilt design featuring 13 Confederacy stars with elements of our own American flag. Fittingly, her camouflage fabric, dyed red, extends our current tenuous existence to art.
Adrienne M. Golub can be reached by e-mail at adrienne.golub@weeklyplanet.com.
This article appears in Nov 22-28, 2001.