Tracy Midulla Reller’s solo exhibition Second Seer is as prim a primal scream as one can imagine.
Most people I know who make art have a story about a time in their life when that making felt like the only thing keeping them sane. Depression, and the resulting artwork, sometimes manifests in correspondingly dramatic form: paintings of scrawling gestures, freighted with existential import; sculptures of twisted metal; an installation of menstrual blood smeared on gallery walls (true story).
The put-togetherness of her work won’t come as a surprise to anyone who knows Reller. Between her gigs as director of the nonprofit gallery Tempus Projects and art professor at HCC Ybor, which hosts the exhibition, that she found time to make art last year seems like a small miracle. Being on the go informed the format of her latest work: small, hand-painted adaptations of found images. Reller’s technique is to paint out the scenes in the images, using white acrylic to create a brushy layer of gauze over the picture until only the eyes of the figures within, and sometimes their hands, remain visible. As a result, the images become contained — cloaked, really — except for peepholes where their intensity streams out.
Most of the images Reller uses are reproductions of Renaissance-into-Baroque paintings of biblical or mythological scenes. She reaches for the most brutal, conspiratorial and perverse of them, from Caravaggio’s Judith slicing off the head of Holofernes to Bronzino’s incestuous Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time. A favorite of Reller’s, Caravaggio’s Medusa also makes an appearance as a shrieking mouth engulfed in white. Line up about 20 of these paintings in the gallery, and you get a picture of immaculate distress, the more unsettling for its restraint. As a break from the snow-white aesthetic, Reller offers pink and black versions mounted on portions of the gallery wall painted pink and black.
Last week she opened up about the emotional context for her work on JoEllen Schilke’s Art In Your Ear on WMNF.
“In the last year, I’ve been dealing with – just personally – conflict and the horror of depression,” she told Schilke. “Not just my own but people that I know. What I was doing with these images is closing in on the parts that I could relate to, which is the gaze.
“There’s this horrible feeling when you are not yourself… if you’re suffering emotionally and you’re the type of person that can’t stop. I don’t stop. I can’t stop – I have to keep going with my day. I have to run my errands, meet my deadlines, get things done. It turns into this feeling of everybody’s watching, or everybody knows that I’m maybe not performing at 100 percent, so I became very aware of the gaze in art and who was watching and onlookers.”
The horror Reller talks about is visible in her paintings but doesn’t drown out counterpoints of seductive delicacy and occasional humor. Medusa’s wordless cry? We’ve all been there, though hopefully not for long. Reller’s paintings offer a reminder that even out of the darkest depths some hint of the glorious sometimes shines.
While Reller has battled depression, her gallery, Tempus Projects, shows no signs of that struggle, flourishing as it embarks on the biggest year in its six-year history. A project space adjacent to its main gallery, formerly occupied by local artist collective QUAID, has been reclaimed as additional exhibition space. Through mid-February it houses a display of more than 100 artists’ notebooks — eight-page Moleskine postal notebooks that fold up into envelopes — adorned with drawings, photographs and collage of all kinds, and fielded through invitations to 200 artists. (The Italian company, whose notebooks have an international cult following, donated the booklets through its Sarasota store.)
In late April, Tempus will launch an open-call artist residency program — the first of its kind in Tampa Bay. Using the apartment overhead, the gallery will award one month’s housing and a $1,000 stipend — a rare benefit — to an artist four times each year, with the goal of enticing artists from around the U.S. to experience the area and share their art with local audiences. Last week, Reller and her board of directors chose video and performance artist Kalup Linzy, whose work is currently on view at the Sundance Film Festival, as the program’s first participant.
On the spectrum of residencies, from ones that charge artists to attend to ones that provide chef-prepared organic meals, Tempus’s falls on the sweeter side. As the program gets rolling, artists will be able to apply for future residency periods through Tempus’s website, Reller says.
“There are a lot of artists who are early to mid-career who would like to get out of town for a while. They can come here and really dig in for a month,” Reller explained by phone last week.
“I don’t think anyone else is doing anything like it in the area. It’s the same reason I run the nonprofit in general: I think we all need it, and I can’t sit around and wait for other people to do it.”
This article appears in Jan 21-27, 2016.