The remarkably hip Dunedin Fine Art Center might be forgiven for becoming a bit too big for its britches, in a literal sense. Home to two of the Bay area's favorite annual art happenings — Wearable Art and Contain It! — DFAC has long put on a surprisingly big show relative to its size.
Earlier this month, the art center celebrated its expansion with the opening of a new wing. The Louis and Valerie Flack East Wing adds 4,500 square feet to DFAC's footprint, bringing its total square footage up to 23,300. In effect, the building's architects have let out a seam, giving DFAC students and teachers more room to spin clay wheels and set up easels. In addition to revamped studio spaces, an expanded interactive children's gallery is the centerpiece of the expansion. Dubbed the David L. Mason Children's Art Museum, it's the kind of space likely to make grown-ups pine for childhood.
An even better reason, though, for visitors of all ages to rejoice at DFAC's expansion comes in the form of a pair of contemporary art exhibitions organized to celebrate the occasion. The spirit of the circus — a theme chosen for both the children's area and the fall art exhibitions — informs the shows, which far exceed any expectations you're likely to have on the basis of that idea, as merry as it is.
In Believe It or Not?, vibrant color photographs transport viewers into a surreal underwater installation by Jason deCaires Taylor. Taylor carves life-sized figures of people — a pregnant woman, a man holding a broom, a nun — out of cement, then submerges them in groups beneath the brilliant blue waters of the Caribbean. Coral and other sea flora and fauna take up residence on the figures's faces and bodies, in some cases melding to them as colorful, richly textured and utterly bizarre organic skins. The resulting works, documented in the photographs, engage nature as a collaborative partner.
If you've never seen one of Carol Prusa's sculptures in person — the Polk Museum of Art in Lakeland has exhibited her work, and she's represented by Bernice Steinbaum Gallery in Miami — make the trip to DFAC just to see one of her silverpoint-decorated domes. Covered in elaborate patterns suggestive of complex mathematical symmetries, the luminous white hemispheres often have a central node or oculus that emits light from LEDs or displays a small video (e.g., of an animated eye). Cynthia Holmes's finely wrought landscape paintings, filled with fantastical (and vaguely carnivorous-looking) fruit and flowers dreamed up by the Pinellas artist, are worth ogling as well. As are sculptures by Cheryl Coon, whose works resemble bizarre, spine-covered critters but are made of steel, nails and thread.
Some of my favorite works in Believe It or Not?, however, are the most understated. Known to many in Tampa Bay, Brian Ransom is a musician as well as a visual artist who makes ceramic sculptures that can be played as musical instruments. Blowing into his hand-crafted vessels, or causing water to run between their chambers, in the case of the vessels on display at DFAC, renders sound that the artist conceived and crafted each "instrument" to produce. The sculptures themselves are understated, bulbous constructions glazed in gray and brown, but as conceptual and performance works they're as dazzling as anything can be.
Believe It or Not? might be a hard act to follow, but Sideshow is up to the task. Tampa-based Lori Ballard anchors the show with a series of large-scale banners that depict circus and sideshow-themed subjects — a ferris wheel, a painting of a clown — in black-and-white photographs. (The eye-popping aesthetics of traditional sideshow banners — garish colors and inventive script advertising freakish oddities — is better represented by Amy "Banner Queen" Johnquist, whose vibrant, hand-lettered paintings function as yang to Ballard's yin in the gallery.) Ballard's artfully composed and sepia-tinted photographs imbue her subjects with the mystique of a bygone era. My favorite shows Elaine Hall, a fifth-generation circus performer whose present-day act incorporates bears, from the top of her glittering, bejeweled headdress looking down.
A handful of other wonderful artists — e.g., New Orleans-based Bryan Cunningham, aka MUTIE; Kreg Yingst; and Daniel Mrgan — round out the show, but I spent the most time taking in Chris Rush's oil portraits of faces floating atop kitsch spin paintings (the kind you churned out as a kid by squirting paint onto a sheet of paper whirling atop a turntable). Rush makes his own spin paintings but repurposes them as a kind of poor man's abstract expressionism — simultaneously beautiful and tacky — upon which he deftly paints, with Old Master-worthy skill, the floating heads of grimacing, smiling and otherwise expressive characters.
In a pair of exhibits full of prodigious conjuring and fanciful creations, Rush's portraits are among the best tricks.
This article appears in Sep 22-28, 2011.