Boundaries
Show runs through July 15 at Portspace, 3007 Beach Blvd., Gulfport. portspacegallery.com.
Perhaps the artists never left Gulfport, but the galleries did.
Now, it seems, they’re coming back.
Portspace is the first gallery of its kind to open in Gulfport this year (following August Vernon Studios, which opened last year). Though the town has a bounty of talented artists and studios thrumming with creativity, the bungalow-housed gallery is the first fine art space dedicated solely to monthly rotating exhibits.
Christina Poindexter, Portspace’s curator, says the gallery’s small space allows it to use the paintings as objects. Katie Cummins’s show, Boundaries, does dovetail nicely with the constraints of the space. Cummins, whose work historically includes sculpture and installations, limits herself here to both oil and encaustic canvases large enough that one would assume they'd dominate the space. Instead, they define it, creating a physical connection to the limits and celebrating them as opportunities. Her show is a metaphor for the space.
“The edges of the canvas are a boundary. The lines created within the space of the canvas and the border between one color and the next are boundaries,” her artist statement says. “These paintings serve to articulate this idea. Instead of seeing a boundary as restrictive, this work explores the activity that exists within
the margins.”
Poindexter says the intimate space allows her to create site-specific shows like Boundaries. That makes sense: Hung in a massive gallery, Boundaries would lose its impact and the paintings would tell a different story, giving patrons another message.
“Katie Cummins’s installation of large-scale paintings confronts visitors with their color, texture and mark-making while also being site-specific to Portspace,” Poindexter says. “The works activate and negotiate the space in the gallery. In order to experience the show in its entirety one must truly have to negotiate in and around the gallery.”
Area galleries can use more of this type of thinking. Serious art anywhere in south Pinellas can use a shot in the arm, but nowhere is this more the case than in Gulfport. The small town on the edge of St. Petersburg once hailed itself — rightfully so — as an arts town, but during the real estate boom a decade ago, the galleries found themselves priced out of the eclectic town.
Prices in Gulfport, like most of Florida, crashed, then rebounded. Gallery owner Randy Loyd bought the gallery and the attached home for $350,000 in October, still far too pricey for most artists.
Fortunately for Gulfport, Loyd is no artist. He’s a businessman, and he believes the Gulfport art scene worthy of investment. He doesn’t expect to quit his day job (he works in technology), but he does believe the stars have aligned for the Gulfport art scene.
He’s blunt when asked why he didn’t opt for St. Pete’s Edge
St. Pete has a thrumming art scene, and to be clear, Loyd wishes the scene and the artists well. But Gulfport is more his speed. It’s one of those things you don’t get unless you live there, perhaps.
“St. Pete is the arts juggernaut. Fuck the arts juggernaut,” he says. “This is a port for artists, designers and the public to exchange ideas.”
Poindexter agrees, albeit with no f-bombs. She has an MFA from FSU and knows her stuff. She’s hung a show that draws you in and makes you one with the space. And at the Friday night ArtWalk, one of the few in the past decade that have had two true galleries and several studios open along Beach Boulevard, Portspace — just as Loyd described it — was alive with the exchange of ideas.
This article appears in Jul 2-8, 2015.