A still from Susanna Wallin’s video, ‘Lizzy.’ Credit: Photo via USFCAMfan/Facebook

The most immersive of all the Skyway shows lives at the University of South Florida’s Contemporary Art Museum, partly because of its focus on a single theme, and partly because of the sounds reverberating through the gallery from Susanna Wallin’s video, “Lizzy” (more about that below).

Subtitled “12 Ways of Looking at a Landscape,” after Wallace Stevens’s 1917 poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” the show offers myriad variations on what a landscape can be.

The 12 artists’ “geographies,” says USF CAM curator-at-large Christian Viveros-Fauné, “are realistic, social, emotional, internal, political, mental, domestic, natural and much more.”

“Skyway 24:12 Ways of Looking at a Landscape” closes Saturday, Nov. 23 at USF CAM in Tampa.
Don’t miss

Susanna Wallin, “Will’s Hill” and “Lizzy” Wallins’s videos mesmerized me when I saw them, and now, post-Helene and Milton, they continue to haunt me. “Will’s Hill” captures the flow of the Hillsborough River, shot from above and projected onto a gallery floor. It offers the uncanny experience of walking on water. “Lizzy,” inspired by a neighbor of Wallin who lived on the river all of her life, contemplates the end of human life vs. the eternal rhythms of the river, the wind, even the gators (I counted 16). Take the time to watch the whole thing. (Those sounds I mentioned? The crash of beams collapsing as Lizzy’s home was demolished.)
Andrés Ramírez’s aerial photographs The awesome scale and crystalline clarity of “Migrant Workers Picking Strawberries” and “Regatta at Clearwater Beach” will take your breath away.
Bradford Robotham’s body landscapes With their undulating blocks of Kelly green and blood orange, these might be misconstrued as paintings à la the abstracted landscapes of Georgia O’Keeffe. But they’re not. They’re photographs, colors created in-camera, and the images are the hills and valleys of Robotham’s own body, its pores and tiny hairs visible on closer inspection.
The astonishing detail of Bruce Marsh’s two paintings from nature, “Beach Stones” and “Sea Grapes III” Opposite his large-format painting of two men in “Conversation,” with what appears to be a Japanese fish lantern hanging somewhat ominously above them.
The collisions of constructed and natural geometries in John Gurbacs’s paintings Warning: “Intersection” in particular may trigger flashbacks of post-hurricane destruction.
The flattened perspective and everyday objects in Sebastian Ore Blas’s paintings It draws the eye into subtly suggestive scenes of same-sex domestic bliss.
The subversion of happy-tourist tropes in Eric Ondina’s nightmarish renditions of theme parks and other amusements.

Also look for

Keith Crowley’s extraordinarily precise watercolors
Karen Tucker Kuykendall’s cartoon-bright florals (with surprises hidden therein)
Caui Lofgren’s mordant appropriation of USDA posters
Erin Titus’s images of conspicuous consumption co-existing uncomfortably with spirituality
Elisabeth Condon’s “floor pours” (one of which seems to flow between Wallin’s two video rooms)
The exhilarating splash of her acrylic wall painting “Burning Embers”

When you emerge from the landscapes of USF CAM’s show, you may find yourself re-seeing the campus landscape—the trees (yes, USF has trees), the leaves, even the latticework above the museum entrance.

Stroll past the shady greenery of the campus lawn behind the museum and stop for a sandwich in the Panera at the Marshall Student Center. You’ll feel like an undergrad again.

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