If you believe that no two people ever see something the same way, you might get a kick out of a new show by artists Brandon Dunlap and Chris Musina.
To create the works on display, the two artists swapped lists of ideas, each sharing a few words, sometimes just a title, about an image in his head. Without revealing anything visual, they returned to their separate studios and interpreted each idea into an artwork.
The images that emerged — facing off in pairs at Blackout Creations, one artist's interpretation "versus" the others, as the show's title suggests — take very different paths from those shared starting points.
Aesthetically, the two USF alums couldn't be more different. Dunlap, a production assistant at Graphicstudio, uses a variety of printmaking techniques to collage mass-media images and original drawings in dense and colorful compositions. Musina, who lives in Toronto, creates comparatively restrained ink and watercolor paintings suggestive of coloring-book illustrations.
Thematically, the images teem with the contemporary zeitgeist of morbidity and war-driven politics. In a pair of cowboy-inspired images, Dunlap puts a political spin on the idea as a pile of jumbled tanks crowned with John Wayne's visage and a distorted American flag, while Musina's presents a male Medusa, a badass, snake-spittin' dude sprung from Western mythology. Where Dunlap's images draw from the shared experience of pop culture, Musina's suggest a collective unconscious.
This is Blackout Creations' second show since opening in September. Graphic designer Chris Parks and tattoo artist Scott Lukacs run their businesses out of the space, which doubles as a gallery, on MLK just south of Central in a building that has been at least partially vacant for as long as I can remember. It's great to see something there — especially something arts-related.
A few blocks away, one of the pillars of downtown St. Pete's arts scene is about to celebrate its second anniversary. Studio@620 opened on Dec. 31, 2004 and has since followed up with an endless stream of adventurous exhibits and the best arts-related programming in the Bay area.
Now on view, paintings by St. Pete artist Emily Page capture the raw energy of dance. She grew up in a family with a strong dance pedigree — her great aunt, Ruth Page, founded the Chicago Ballet — and the leaping, twirling and stretching figures in her paintings pay tribute to her grandmother, Beatrice Page, a successful dancer, poet and author who recently passed away.
Though her own dancing days ended when she was still a child, Page's firsthand experience with the art of movement shines through in her paintings. Because the figures in her paintings have such convincing dynamism, I was surprised to learn that she photographed students from Soulful Arts Dance Academy in static poses for later reference rather than painting from life. If the mark of a great artist is one-upping reality, Page — by translating still poses into bodies in motion — succeeds admirably here.
Rendered in a combination of oil on canvas and patina on copper, the paintings are also interesting for their depiction of space. Page opts not to place the dancers in a realistic space, but instead to float them in a kind of vibrant, moving ether that she creates by layering flecks of color with thick strokes of the palette knife. The resulting mental/emotional space of sheer energy makes the paintings invigorating to view.
Finally, it's been an exciting week for the Tampa Museum of Art and, by extension, anyone who lives in the Bay area — that is, if you're still following the seemingly never-ending saga about whether the museum will get a new building. This week ushered in the beginning of the end of that saga when the museum's board of trustees selected an architect to design a new facility that will sit on the north side of Curtis Hixon Park next to the Poe parking garage and the future children's museum.
When museum brass announced their decision on Thursday, I was filled with excitement for the future of downtown and TMA. Following public presentations on Wednesday by three architectural candidates, who presented past work and talked in broad terms about possibilities for the new museum, they chose Stanley Saitowitz of San Francisco. To be honest, when he took the podium on Wednesday — a charming caricature of an architect in an oversized black blazer and funky glasses — and began to speak quite abstractly about how the new building should flow like the river, I wondered if he really stood a chance.
Of two other candidates, Charles Rose Architects of Somerville, Mass., whose principal designed the Gulf Coast Museum of Art, presented a reliable, known quantity. Representatives from Robert A.M. Stern Architects in New York, the firm responsible for downtown Clearwater's new library, had all the enthusiasm of a pair of accountants — and their principal was notably absent.
Saitowitz emerged from the field as personally committed to the project and passionate about his vision; once he finished talking in theoretical terms, he was able to answer questions about materials, budget and time frame in a straightforward way.
His past designs, both in extensive residential settings and at the Holocaust Memorial in Boston — where glass towers filled with steam the temperature of human breath give visitors a real, physical sense of the victims — have been driven by high ideas but are also people-friendly. The museum board's choice gives Bay area residents something to look forward to; by choosing Saitowitz, they've been good stewards not only of their institution's interest, but of the community's at large.
Next week, TMA travels to Art Basel Miami Beach to showcase local artist Jeff Whipple in an outdoor multimedia installation at South Seas Hotel. It's an event that aims to articulate Tampa's position on the arts-and-cultural map and promote the city and museum to the tens of thousands of domestic, European and Latin American curators, collectors and tourists who will be there.
I'll be blogging from the massive art fair and many satellite events, which run from Thurs., Dec. 7 through Sun., Dec. 10. Keep an eye on blurbex.com for the latest news.
This article appears in Dec 6-12, 2006.