There was big media coverage a few weeks ago as the Arts Center announced the big news that they had nabbed glass artist Dale Chihuly for a new gallery that would be dedicated to his work. This was portrayed as another cultural coup for St. Petersburg's downtown, as it included plans for high-rise condominium units, too. The big surprise for some of us was that the Arts Center was even looking to expand their thriving and ambitious programs. With all good wishes to St. Petersburg and Chihuly, I hope that the Center will continue to exhibit the quality regional art that has given them their good name.
The exhibitions that opened last weekend evidence more of the discerning programming we have come to expect. There is not space enough here to discuss all five of the small exhibitions on view through October 23 (they include work by Melissa Christiano and prints from the Pinellas County Center for the Arts). But the first three galleries offer a chance to compare four established artists who deal in figurative subjects and spiritual queries — Thomas Murray, Chris Scarborough, Edgar Sanchez Cumbas and Donna Gordon — all (except for Scarborough) residents of Tampa Bay.
Thomas Murray: Name, Mine
Painter Thomas Murray's oil-on-paper studies entitled "Jesus" are portraits of men named Jesus, interspersed with some abstract compositions. Murray began considering the weight and meaning of the appellation after regularly buying cigars from the same vendor who happened to be named Jesus. Murray Googled "Jesus" and came up with scores of images of individuals bearing the name. From these he selected subjects for the current series. He painted each of the 12 in a different style, emphasizing the human and linguistic ambiguities imposed by the name.
While the Jesus paintings don't contain overt Christian iconography, Murray uses a Tibetan Buddhist symbol in several of the works. It is a kind of geometric or spectral jewel, perhaps an abstract lotus flower. Murray found it in a Tibetan book on the proper proportions for representing Buddhist deities such as Standing Bodhisattva and Seated Goddess. The most striking of the images is a grey-scale blurred image of a face painted in the manner of Gerhard Richter. The precise outline of the Tibetan symbol is applied like a stamp to the foreground of the work: a Buddhist religious symbol superimposed on a ghostly human image of a Jesus.
The liberty of departing from his established style gives this series a new animation and spirit. It is clear that Murray will continue to search artistically and spiritually.
Chris Scarborough: This Was Better Than Real Life
Scarborough's large color photographs are portraits in digitally altered states. Headshots are nearly actual size, nakedly exposing pore and hair, while other features are unnaturally enhanced through the use of Adobe Photoshop. Each subject's eyes are enlarged to the scale of Japanese "anime," making a painfully obvious first impression that the viewer is hard put to look beyond. It is much like trying to make eye contact with a person wearing really strong reading glasses. Except the glasses aren't there.
Growing up with Barbie (she and I were born in the same year) and being a parent whose kids watch Cartoon Network, I have lost the objective outrage I should perhaps feel about our cultural worship of big eyes, big breasts and tiny waists. Yes, the photographer's models — real people — appear alien when altered. While he makes his point immediately by the simultaneous strangeness and familiarity of the images, the effect is too chilly to raise many questions. Cartoons are meant to exaggerate cultural archetypes of evil and beauty, so using another medium — photography — to mimic those techniques is not particularly enlightening. Strange, yes. Perhaps more affecting would be photographs of real surgically altered people — who have become as common in our times as cartoon characters — with their frozen brows, scars and all. Now that's scary.
Edgar Sanchez Cumbas & Donna Gordon: From The Ground Up
A pairing that promises parallels of figurative representation in different media shows the paths of these two artists diverging. Cumbas' past paintings showed a persistent enigmatic character hiding or struggling to emerge from a landscape or vessel. Gordon's figures were crowded faces trying to speak and break away from the clay. Now Cumbas' man is monk-like, central to and integrated into the landscape. Gordon's figures are active and fully formed. The tortured expressionism of both artists is in transition.
In two of Gordon's works, we still see desperate faces competing for air. "Extended Family" is a bronze rectangular frieze packed with small visages, and "One World," an impressively sized fire-glazed vessel, has a rim densely sculpted with a chorus of expressive heads. The feeling of both of these pieces is claustrophobic and Biblical, like Ghiberti's bronze door or a baptismal font on the wrong side of St. Peter. The larger group of work is entitled "Circles" (each piece numbered), wide ceramic rings resembling sections of pipe encircling figures at different stages of life, strolling, swinging, sleeping and in other poses. Though placed inside the circle, the figures are autonomous, not struggling to escape their vessels. These figures have a confidence unlike those of the darker works. Sadly, in exchange for their liberation, they come dangerously close to being mere figurines.
Cumbas' new work, "Sacred Ground," is clearly influenced by Chinese art and the practice of Buddhism, which the artist has been studying for the last two years. The mysterious humble man that has appeared in Cumbas' work for years seems to have naturally metamorphosed into a Buddha figure. He has come out from hiding to comfortably inhabit Asian landscapes of layered mountains and cherry blossoms. The ambiguous landscapes of the artist's earlier work are now surrounded by flat airy opaques of aquamarine and gold, with archaeological layers and real mountainous space. The man in some ways is the same vulnerable and strange figure. His narrow eyes look in different directions, but one of them is always looking out of the picture plane to arrest the viewer. Looking back, it seems he was always a kind of Buddha.
It's not clear that the Arts Center anticipated the spiritual and material threads that would bind the disparate figures in these galleries together. But, from the computer Jesuses to the idealized anime photographs to the new age clay figures to the Buddha, these artists are seeking a higher plane.
This article appears in Sep 14-20, 2005.