Good things are afoot at [5]art. The West Tampa exhibition space — synonymous with the quintet of artists who run it — has been a little engine that could for the past three years, ever growing bigger, better and more formidable as a player in Tampa Bay's fledgling contemporary art scene. In January, the group took the wraps off a new space approximately twice as large as their former digs in the historic Santaella cigar factory, and on Friday they debut the first of their exhibitions that will travel to galleries around the country.
While that's all good news for [5]art, it's even better news for the local arts community as a whole. The group's new space, a crisply professional white box, raises the bar for visual art venues in the Bay area and widens the net of artists who may want to show work there. Meanwhile, [5]art's former home (the suite next door to its new one) is now occupied by three04, an up-and-coming exhibition space. So far this year, the two venues have managed to draw an impressively big and diverse audience by coordinating their opening receptions.
With that in mind, Friday's debut should be something to see. The [5]art exhibit, Five + 5, rounds up five of its most active members (the amorphous group is only nominally a quintet) along with five guest artists. After a stint in Tampa, the show travels to Young Blood Gallery and Boutique in Atlanta, Twist Art Gallery in Nashville and Gallery 25 in Fresno, Calif. At the adjacent three04, a two-person exhibit focuses on work by Tracy Midulla Reller and Kurt Piazza, [5]art's core duo, and in the corridor outside the two venues work by Shane Hoffman and Daniel Mrgan goes on view for one night only. Add spins by DJ Brian Oblivion, and you've got a lot of sights and sounds to savor.
Without adhering to any particular theme, Five + 5 offers an array of works on paper by Reller, Piazza, Ariel Baron-Robbins, Cameron Brian, Joe Griffith, Robbie Land, Diran Lyons, Ruth Santee, Jasmine Schurrer and Atsushi Tameda. Selections run the gamut from Tameda's tender, marker-and-gouache-on-gold-leaf paintings atop vintage postcards, to Schurrer's taxonomic diagram of dildos. Some, like an expressively abstract painting by Baron-Robbins, burst with color; others, like Reller's graphite drawings of hybrid human-and-animal figures, are studies in restraint. Imagine a dinner party with 10 friends who couldn't be more different, yet each shares something in common with at least one other person at the table. Without so much discord that the exhibit fails to cohere as a whole, the artworks carry on a conversation marked by lively variation.
Perhaps most intriguing are a pair of large photographic prints — one of a bamboo cigarette holder, the other of a marked-up copy of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze's book Cinema II: The Time-Image — by Lyons, a former Hillsborough Community College art professor who now lives in California. The images, excerpted from a series, document artifacts integral to the development of Goodbye Victoria, a feature film project two years in the making that can be viewed in 13 parts on YouTube. (Go to http://www.youtube.com/user/LYONSPOTTER.)
The beautifully shot movie tells the story of character Bradley Mason (portrayed by Lakeland native William Patrick Shaffer) and his ill-fated move from Charleston to Hollywood in pursuit of fame and wealth. With scenes pieced together from shots that appear to depict the same events taking place at different times and places, the film plays out as a disorienting, hipster-flavored homage to Godard — and a surprisingly entertaining one. Ybor City and downtown Tampa figure prominently as stand-ins for the South Carolina city, and many from the cast and crew hail from the Bay area. (With any luck, Lyons says, he'll screen the film locally this year.)
After Five + 5 moves on, local art lovers can look forward to seeing work by artists from the Atlanta, Nashville and Fresno galleries where the show will travel next. In April, a cadre of Young Blood Gallery's artists from Atlanta descend on [5]art for a group show called Fever Fakers.
Their artists bringing fresh ideas here — our artists getting exposure there. Do the math, and Five + 5 adds up to more than the sum of its parts.
This article appears in Mar 4-10, 2009.