For a film fest, Ybor Festival of the Moving Image seems decidedly uninterested in limiting itself to celluloid. With components of performance, sound and installation, the five-year-old event takes a broad interpretation of the idea "moving image," even featuring an exhibit of paintings this year. If some of the images aren't literally in motion, they should all at least move you in an emotional sense, explains festival director David Audet.
"Global visions" is this year's theme, though experimentation and interdisciplinary collaborations are just as prominent motifs — not to mention, of course, Ybor itself as a subject. So whether you're a self-identified film geek, art fart, experimental music nut or Seventh Avenue gadabout, the weekend's festivities offer plenty of reasons to join in.
Here are some visual artists to watch for.
Ferdie Pacheco hardly needs an introduction. Even if you've never seen his colorful paintings of Tampa and Ybor City life during the 1930s and '40s, you probably know him as the "Fight Doctor": the guy who spent 17 years in Muhammad Ali's corner, resigned when the champ's management refused to heed his warnings about Ali's failing health and went on to become a 25-year boxing commentator for NBC, Showtime and Univision.
As one of Ybor's most famous sons, Pacheco — a doctor, pharmacist, author and artist — has also served as a visual historian, painting what have come to be thought of as classic Ybor scenes from his youth: lectors reading to workers in cigar factories, workers eating Cuban sandwiches for lunch, soldiers and young women at USO dances, domino matches, and—a trademark for Pacheco—huge crowds sandwiched into trolley cars, restaurants and Tampa's streets.
In conjunction with the festival (which screened a documentary about Pacheco in 2004), a new batch of his much-in-demand Ybor City paintings will be showcased at El Pasaje. Thursday night offers a chance to meet the artist at an exhibit reception that will double as a book-signing for his recent memoir, Blood In My Coffee: the Life of the Fight Doctor. In all, Pacheco has written 14 books, four of them about Ybor; at 80, he says he'd like to write four more.
But the well-known Ybor images aren't all visitors will see from Pacheco during the festival. Some of his newest subject matter is drawn from what might seem an unlikely source: the HBO series Deadwood.
Pacheco's interest in the late-19th-century Dakota town where prospectors hunted for gold dates back to his childhood, when he discovered a book about the Wild West in his father's library. When the HBO series came out, he was hooked, Pacheco recalled during a phone interview from his home in Miami last week. He began a series of paintings based partially on the TV show and partially on his own historical research.
The pictures exhibit Pacheco's trademark visual style, but also invite the delightfully peculiar experience of recognizing HBO cast members. In one portrait — the images are a mix of intimate portraits and densely populated interiors — Swearengen and "Sally" (whose name has been changed to avoid copyright issues) bear more than a passing resemblance to actors Ian McShane and Paula Malcomson.
Given Pacheco's own TV celebrity — plans are in the works for a feature film biopic about him, he said — I find the choice fascinating. Pacheco thinks they are some of the best paintings he's ever done. On Sunday evening, Para Gallery, the site of the "Deadwood" show, hosts a reception with the artist.
Joe Griffith, founder of Para — who happens to be a cousin of Ferdie Pacheco's through his grandfather, John Pacheco — will show a site-specific piece he and 10 other members of local artist collaborative Experimental Skeleton created for the Cuban Club lobby. "Cherry Stars" includes a video projection (onto the lobby's ceiling) of the artists performing a cigar constellation map of Ybor, with glowing cigar butts marking the locations of former cigar factories and experimental art spaces in the neighborhood (the former often being reclaimed as the latter). Also on display: the black plywood panel, riddled with holes, behind which the artists puffed on stogies to make the video.
"It's the grossest thing we've ever done," Griffith admitted. Coming from a group that once used medicinal leeches to collect participants' "genetic information," that's saying something. The piece debuts on Thursday night and will run for the length of the festival.
Gustavo Matamoros began with an apology, of sorts, for choosing the cigar to represent Ybor City. "In a way, I sort of hate to do that because it's obvious," the composer explained last week from his office in Miami, where he directs the annual Subtropics Experimental Music & Sound Arts Festival. (This year's installment took place Feb. 23-March 4.) But Matamoros' surreal soundscapes are all about deconstructing the obvious, taking familiar sounds and making them sound utterly extraordinary.
The tiny crackle of a cigar burning doesn't sound all that strange, but by the time Matamoros gets through with it — amplifying it out of scale, adding other sounds and running it through the "filter" of the El Pasaje arcade's architectural echo chamber — it should sound downright alien. The composer likens his method of collecting sounds to gathering ingredients for a soup, all of which he'll combine during an improvised performance Saturday night. In addition to the Ybor-inspired burning cigar, he's been collecting sounds related to Florida, including a recent fascination: underwater fish recordings.
Colorful chiffon screens hung inside the arches of the El Pasaje arcade will serve as an interactive backdrop for Matamoros' piece and a composition by Paul Reller, director of USF's electronic music studios. In addition to sound, both pieces will include a video projection component. (HCC student dancers and performance artist Pat Oleszko will also interact with the screens.) The screens, Seattle-based artist Shahreyar Ataie's response to El Pasaje's architecture, are intended to function during the day like stained glass, transforming sunlight into color. At night, they swing into motion, slowly rotating inside the arches as videos are projected on them.
It almost wouldn't be an Ybor Festival of the Moving Image without Pat Oleszko. The mischievous performance artist, who performed at the festival in 2004, combines outrageous inflatable costumes and ridiculously bad political, sexual and pop-cultural puns to create memorable characters like Jazzmin or Knee-o-Fashism.
On Thursday night, she'll debut the first of two performances commissioned for the festival: "Puff Patty and the Six Cigars," a "walk and roll event down El Pasaje arcade," according to the festival website, with HCC students cast in the role of six cigars. On Saturday night, "Innuendo (And Out The Other)" will find Oleszko playing the role of cigar factory lector as she enacts a series of stories.
Also on Saturday, Oleszko and other filmmakers will take part in a panel on "Motion Media: Past, Present, Future." Given the variety of moving images on display at the festival, it should be worth tuning into.
Expect the unexpected at the Ybor Festival.
This article appears in Apr 18-24, 2007.