If you've lived long in the Bay area, you've probably begun to notice that Florida has (at least) two very different populations: one made up of mostly transient city folk with nary a clue about state history or a care about conservation, and another, much smaller, contingent that lives outside the bubble, struggling to maintain a way of life that goes back decades, if not a hundred years or more.
Diana Lucas Leavengood's photos, in the sort of whimsically beautiful way that avoids getting bogged down in politics or ideology, provide glimpses of that disappearing Florida. Leavengood, who grew up in Chautauqua County, N.Y., began to document Florida three years ago while driving up and down U.S. 301 as a tourist with her husband Bill, a playwright and native Floridian who grew up in a St. Petersburg house (since demolished) designed by architect Paul Rudolph. As they drove along, Bill often noted how much things had changed since his childhood.
Leavengood was struck by the unique — and often kitschy or folksy — brand of Florida's visual culture and how quickly it was being replaced by homogenous new development. People she met along the way seemed to feel besieged; when she struck up a conversation with the owner of a store selling seashell figurines in Citra, north of Ocala, the woman warily warned her, "I'm not selling." At a roadside orange juice stand, marked by a sign advertising "Fresh Juice," another owner told Leavengood that small citrus growers like him would be gone in five years.
Despite their bittersweet origins, Leavengood's prints are bright and friendly, immortalizing the colorful shell figurines or the eye-popping juice sign rather than preaching about the issues. But beneath the lush colors, each image has a story to tell — a consequence, perhaps, of Leavengood's training as a filmmaker at the California Institute of the Arts. More than 30 pictures altogether, curated by Kimberly Finn, are on display at Davidson Fine Art, a small gallery and frame shop next to the Arts Center in downtown St. Pete.
Double exposures, of which there are many in the exhibit, have become Leavengood's trademark (along with a thick black border created by the edge of the negative). She produces the overlapping images the old-fashioned way, shooting a roll of film of one subject, rewinding it and exposing it again with pictures of something else.
That's how she made an Ybor City-themed series, combining iconic sights like the Virgin Mary and Ybor Square's neon sign, or a series of children playing overlapped with a turtle crossing U.S. 301. Some of the results are so subtle they seem natural; others are vividly surreal.
If you can't afford a print, you might still score an artists' trading card from Leavengood. Each incorporates a small one-of-a-kind print (the ones I saw were brightly colored self-portraits), but you'll need to bring one of your own to exchange.
Among Tampa artists, Jeff Whipple stands out as a polyglot, successfully working as a visual artist, an experimental filmmaker and even a playwright — and winning awards in each idiom. Last year, when the Tampa Museum of Art wanted to make a splash at Art Basel Miami Beach, they called on the Seminole Heights resident, who also teaches at the University of Tampa, to dream up something big.
Whipple stepped up to the plate and turned out a complex multimedia project that transformed the South Seas Hotel (on South Beach's Art Deco hotel row) into a living work of art.
The experience began, for visitors, with synched videos looped inside custom frames built by Whipple and mounted atop the hotel's entryway. An eerie electronic soundtrack repeated, as performers — naked but covered with paper symbols that resembled a three-pronged wiggly quotation mark — engaged in a wonderfully bizarre dance. Inside the hotel's lobby and corridors, large-scale paintings, photographs and paper wiggles completed the experience.
It was, for those who had never experienced it before, an immersive introduction to Whipple's world. For nearly 20 years, he has painted amazingly lifelike figures doing peculiar things (among my favorites, a woman enduring an onslaught of projectile hotdogs). To let yourself become engrossed in a Whipple painting is to take a magical elevator ride from the ground floor of reality to a fantasy world rather in debt to Keith Haring.
The mysterious wiggle shape that recurs in his paintings is a "spasm," a Whipple symbol both for life's vigor and brevity, and for meaning's relationship with chaos. (One squiggly mark is an anomaly, two a coincidence, Whipple explains, but three marks — now that's a pattern.)
In recent years, the spasm has moved from the background of his images to center stage as the sign grew, in Whipple's consciousness, from a decorative accessory to the fundamental element of his visual language. The latest spasms are up front and, quite literally, in your face; they're a force to be reckoned with.
At C. Emerson Fine Arts, new paintings and sculpture by Whipple elaborate on the spasm theme. (Video and photographs from the Basel project will also be on view.) Large-scale paintings depict archetypal figures — the Historian, the Mover-and-Shaker, the Patron — covered with spasms. But are the figures blinded and overwhelmed or, on the contrary, so deeply engaged with life that they have spasm static cling? Whether the portraits are meant to be taken in earnest, lightly ironic or somewhere in between makes for a richly contemplative encounter.
Heads up, all artists looking for exhibition space. Realtor Abbey Dohring would like to invite nonprofit arts groups to propose temporary uses for an unoccupied, for-sale office building in downtown Tampa. (She's looking for one-time events, not extended residencies.)
This weekend, the Las Damas de Arte holds its popular "Sunday In the Arts" exhibit and silent auction in the blond brick storefront at 1110 N. Florida Ave., which is in mint condition and has electricity and air conditioning. If you have an event to propose, call Dohring at 813-223-9111.
This article appears in May 2-8, 2007.