So we've come to the end. Our survey of the locally sourced art in Skyway: A Contemporary Collaboration has brought us to the third and final leg, and a strange and distant territory: Sarasota. It's a land of beautiful sedans and well-dressed retirees and an oddly high cost of living — call it Share-a-Soda, because your poor ass can't afford two.
It's also the home of the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, the most richly opulent museum our area has to offer. That's no knock on the fine institutions in Tampa and St. Pete participating in Skyway's tri-city expo; the Ringling is just a different animal, that's all. Not every museum can be founded by circus barons.
So we cross the golden tightrope of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge and travel down to the surreal city at the tail end of this surreal metropolitan area. It's not a bad drive. And it's a necessary one, in order to get a grip on Skyway's grand project. The Ringling edition hosts a smaller number of artists than either of the other two museums, and if anything, the artists skew slightly younger and slightly weirder. This is impressive, because the other Skyway artists were relatively young and weird to begin with.
Matthew Wicks takes a similar angle as Aiosa's, elevating a totally mundane object (a plastic laundry basket) by carefully reproducing it in white ceramic. The finished object is lovely to behold. Its transformation from domestic drudge to art object is complete. (In a distant corner of the Ringling, the ghost of Marcel Duchamp is grinning.)
Much of this work takes some effort. Resist any temptation to bypass Jason Lazarus's Recordings #5 (Isabel) as a white-squares-on-a-white-wall exercise. In fact, all those squares are found photographs — with the images turned toward the wall. What's revealed are the tiny marks and notes that people have written on the back of snapshots since forever. (Well, until recently, anyway.)
The ghostly descriptors are weirdly tantalizing and powerful. One reads: "This is Johnny proposing to me. + oh-boy am I going to say Yes. Yes. real quick. (1936)". Dying to see the actual picture? Well, you'll have to invent it yourself.
Desireé Moore sure creates her own images, in her short film Over and Under and Through. The film presents the interior life of an adolescent girl as a beautiful phantasmagoria. And something like the work of Bruce Marsh at the Tampa Museum of Art, it also provides a rare glimpse of the granular reality outdoors, as the camera moves through bedrooms and bathrooms and suburban streets. In an exhibition entirely sourced from one geographical area, it's good to see these investigations of the home turf itself.
Skyway is up until early fall at all three locations. Tampa Bay's artists, as always, have done their part. The museums have also done their part, by placing them in their beautiful spaces. Now it's your turn, dear member of the art-appreciating public. You are the third leg of this stool — and around here, that third leg has historically been a bit wobbly. Let's buy from these artists, hire them, enable them, let them fix and transform our spaces. There are at least three museums' worth of them in our own backyard, ready to break through.
With our Visual Arts critic fulfilling the residency part of her MFA, James Chapin has stepped in to take a look at local art. Caitlin should return soon, but watch for more from James as he explores the art scene in Tampa Bay.
This article appears in Aug 10-17, 2017.