The Tampa Tribune
Arts Extra! Gallery Glimpses: Reviewed This Week
July 17, 1997
Issue - Pg -
Author: Joanne Milani
Arts Extra! Gallery Glimpses: Reviewed This Week
.5 & 10 (Art for Change): (rating: this show expands and offers alternatives to the Tampa Museum's "Undercurrent/Overview" exhibition reviewed below) While are art experts made the selections in the Tampa Museum's survey of the local art scene, Brandon-based artist J.S.G. Boggs pulled together his roundup of works by Tampa and New York artists including David Byrne of the Talking Heads.
Thanks to great private sponsorship and energetic participants, you have a fun, gorilla-type show to enjoy. It's fun because it's uneven. You'll find highly sophisticated works displayed next to some very forgettable, hackneyed stuff - all on the premises of a 1960s-era dime store. It's a "gorilla" show because this is an unofficial, self-elected lineup runningfor only a week (through Sunday). However, it is a stop on Saturday's Summer -97 Open House.
Since some of the participating artists also are represented in the Tampa Museum show, you have a chance to see a wider spectrum of their work. Among them: the adventurous, top-notch veteran of the Tampa scene, painter Theo Wujcik; 19 year-old computer-camera prodigy David Breeze of Brandon, Hoang Van Bui, a young Vietnam-born artist whose installations have been ranking in top prizes; and a St. Petersburg artist who fashions ceramics of unsettling beauty, Yasuko Nakamura.
The best canvases in the dime store are by Tampa's Tom Kettner and Sarasota's Leslie Lerner - both of whom are absent from the museum's exhibition. In "Nuclear Winter Stereogram" Kettner plays off thickly painted red borders against the receding space of a devastated, white landscape. Lerner uses Oriental rules of perspective - no receding background as in Western art, just flat patterns arranged against an atmospheric haze - in his canvases filled with costumed figures, rocks and ice floes.
Also worth you attention: Jim Lute's giant black-and-white abstraction. David Greg Harth's disturbing photography and Nurit Newman's sly videos. Boggs has fun with funny money as he tweaks your expectations about what you are seeing. And Jon Karl Holm concocts a lush installation using wooden knife holders. David Byrne's photographs and light boxes were not yet on view when the show was reviewed.