The visual art component of this year's Sensory Overload, curated by Jay Giroux, brings together a diverse group of close to 20 visual artists. Among the titles they answer to: skateboarder, architect, furniture designer, art professor, printmaker, sculptor and painter. There's even a septuagenarian among them who could teach some of these pretty young things a thing or two about partying hard, not to mention making art. Here's a sampling:
Craig Kaths
Kaths' quarter-pipe skateboard ramp will likely blow away the competition for Most Interactive Piece of Art. Situated in the Cuban Club's courtyard, it's expected to draw serious practitioners from the Skatepark of Tampa, where Kaths will get some help constructing the ramp. When the 25-year-old isn't skating or making art and music, he's slaving over a hot press at USF's Graphicstudio as a production assistant.
"I'm going to work at the park on the actual face of [the quarter-pipe], and I'm going to take it off. Then I'm probably going to take a bunch of photographs of downtown Tampa and then project those images onto this ramp and then stencil out the whole image on the whole thing. The ramp itself will probably be anywhere from 16 to 20 feet wide by 8 to 12 feet tall."
Theo Wujcik
Though his prints and paintings belong to top-shelf collections including the Museum of Modern Art, Theo Wujcik, 71, still enjoys mixing it up with local kids. The former USF professor calls 2007 his "retro year," with emerging artists approaching him to revive Mododado, an experimental art group known for its unconventional parties that he founded in the 1980s. At Sensory Overload, Wujcik will unveil a triptych of 5-foot-square canvases titled "Orgasmatic." The paintings play on the idea of climax, collaging comic-book babes within a visual "frame" of chain-link fence, a motif he first used in 1984.
"The title is 'Orgasmatic,' so that's the content of the work — orgasm. … I had two of them done when Jay saw them, and then a group of kids were coming over from [art collective] Flight 19: Jay Giroux and his friends and their wives. They wanted to revive Mododado and talk to me about it. The funny thing was, I said, since the work was out, I said, 'This is "Orgasmatic." This is Stage One, this is Stage Two, and,' I said, 'I'm still working on Stage Three.' And [one of the women] said, 'We're all still working on Stage Three.'"
Kim Michelle Coakley
Coakley, a 23-year-old Cape Cod native, recently moved to Tarpon Springs from Boston, where she graduated from Mass College of Art. Keep an eye on this emerging artist: Her "shapes," made from weaving together sections of screen-printed paper to create wall-mounted pieces, will be featured this June in the prestigious magazine New American Paintings. At the Cuban Club, Coakley will transform her space by creating a floor-to-ceiling installation of large-scale shapes and draped tulle.
"I'm still using the prints that I made [in college]. I made hundreds and hundreds of prints, silkscreen mostly, mostly silkscreen on paper. What I do is I cut them up into shapes and reconfigure them all the time, recreating the composition. … What I'm doing for Sensory Overload is making a big installation of them. So you're going to walk into this space, like a corner, and you're going to walk around in a half circle and through these shapes."
Neil Bender
Bender, a USF art professor, has mainlined pop culture since a New Jersey childhood rich in hip-hop, He-Man and shopping malls. Now 30, he constructs mixed-media paintings and drawings that reflect a media-saturated and hypersexual world, where obscenity is nearly ubiquitous, and "CNN looks more like MTV every day." A series of recent drawings takes his exploration to new dimensions: up to 4 feet by 5 feet.
"There's one drawing where there's a kind of a figure that's sticking his head — I guess — in kind of a plug, like a light socket, and there are these yellow, bolt-ish rays emanating from it, and he's kind of immersed in a flesh ring, this oval of peachy drawings culled from a bunch of different sources. It just seemed very appropriate for Sensory Overload. Here's someone who, this protagonist in the drawing, had been overindulgent and was getting shocked."
Will Stack & Robert Ibarra
Two Ybor architects and designers weigh in with an 8-foot steel monolith designed to stand tall on the Cuban Club's third floor. Will Stack, whose Second Avenue studio fabricates furniture and architectural components, paired up with his former mentor, Robert Ibarra of Alfonso Architects, to create the piece. Stack, 36, said he and Ibarra responded to the space by creating something "simple but dramatic in its mass and scale."
"This is going to be an exploration. It's a two-dimensional sculpture using raw carbon steel sheets, and basically they're going to come together, to fasten together to make a [three]-dimensional sculpture. And then we're going to be playing with lighting and shadows on the sculpture, kind of playing with some of the things we'd like to do, like maybe some acrylic panels or what we do a lot is plasma-cut, actual graphics into the material and then apply it to the structure."
Shara Dewitt & Kristen Brown
Dewitt, 26, and Brown, 24, met three years ago after HCC art professor Tracy Midulla noted a similarity in their styles. For their first collaboration, the two emerging printmakers plan to make ink transfers and monoprints on wood panels. Both share an interest in combining poetic fragments of text with images of the figure — expressive hands or detailed anatomical drawings — that temper sweetness with a slightly dark edge.
"We're just going to end up passing [the panels] back and forth until we both feel like they're done. The idea kind of came from this weird Internet meme thing called Photoshop tennis. … There's teams of people who, for lack of anything better to do, they start a Photoshop image and then just send it back — each team has a hit at it — and then they randomly decide that it's done at one point. … I thought that it would be interesting to do that with art, especially since our styles are so similar," Brown said.
Urban Explorer's Handbook 2007
Sensory Overload Edition
Click here for the other senses
Sensory Overload: The party
This article appears in Mar 21-27, 2007.