The images that surround us
An exhibit at an Ybor City art gallery sets a scene with a creative look at landscapes.
By LENNIE BENNETT, Times art critic
Published September 7, 2006
TAMPA- Twenty years ago, Brad Cooper realized his big dream. Using prize money from an outdoor art show, the painter bought a storefront in Ybor City, carved out a living space in back and opened a gallery.
He has seen the historic district change, mostly in bad ways, he believes, with the influx of bars and tattoo parlors and the migration of small businesses and fellow artists who gave the place its character.
But through it all, Cooper and his dream survived. He thinks Ybor City is poised for another change, a good one, with the residential building boom all around him.
"This place is about to take off," he says. "But I'm passing on it."
Because Cooper has a new dream now, to move to Greece with his wife, Elizabeth, within the next six months. He's tired of the grind, the realities of organizing several exhibitions a year, finding the point at which financial pragmatism and artistic vision translate into a livelihood.
The gallery is on the market, and perhaps another idealistic art-lover will purchase it for a new gallery. Or maybe it will become a restaurant or boutique.
But before Cooper, 50, says goodbye to all that, he has some good things to show us, as he always has.
Right now, it's his Biennial.
"Landscape in the Postmodern" surveys a genre that, several hundred years ago, was a predictable measure of an artist's ability to paint pretty. Pastoral countrysides, ancient monuments, grand vistas were oversize postcards of near or away that inspired and idealized.
Modern art had other ideas about how our surroundings were interpreted: beauty could be found in industrial progress or progress could be a vehicle by which anything of beauty was obliterated.
That dichotomy exists still. A landscape is no longer something we simply see; it is something we affect and change, even in our passive presence.
Thirty-four paintings, prints, drawings and photographs make that point, mostly without sledgehammering us with visual platitudes or cliches.
David Underwood, for example, pieces together a photomontage with staples. A pristine swath of grass seems to beg for a romp that is denied by a "Keep Off the Grass" sign; a large tree shot in three sections because of its height; unscalable rock faces and untouchable cacti are all formidable and unapproachable but still vulnerable to our meddling and in need of our protection that is often as crude as the staples holding the images together.
Clayton Merrell's Eggshell Sky Projection I is an exquisite little slice of blue sky and clouds painted with egg tempera on a piece of cracked eggshell, mounted on paper. The metaphors and associations are obvious but they are realized with great eloquence and directness.
Chris McCauley's Abandoned Pond Hatchery #2, winner of Best of Show, is another ironically beautiful work. Water lilies float on the surface, a homage to Claude Monet, who was all about surfaces, but McCauley goes deeper, to the submerged, dying life beneath. Her medium is encaustic - pigment and wax - an ancient technique that will probably outlive this pond.
Beverley Southcott photographed an idyllic beach, sea and sky onto which she superimposes the message "Un-Reel" suspended in a aureole of white light. She extends the verbal pun by surrounding all the people swimming and sunbathing in that same unreal brightness and artificiality.
"Landscape in the Postmodern" is full of dialogues about how we see and treat our world. Because they potentially say much about ourselves, they are in a sense landscapes as portraiture.
Lennie Bennett can be reached at (727) 893-8293 or lennie@sptimes.com