Tony Wong Palms – Bay Art Files

2025 MFA Thesis Exhibition
University of South Florida Contemporary Museum of Art
April 4 – May 10, 2025

By Tony Wong Palm

Current world population is 8.2 billion; and an intrepid percentage of these humans have chosen the artist’s path.

Six of these in particular have an exhibition at USF CAM (University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum in Tampa, Florida).

The exhibition’s self declared title, “Thank You in Advance, 2025 MFA Thesis Exhibition” tells of these artists at a threshold propelling them beyond their academic studios.

The six artists are: Jocelyn Chase, Olin Fritz, Adrian Gomez, Michael Lonchar, Emily Martinez, and Tom Rosenow.

A fully illustrated exhibition catalogue accompanies the exhibition with an in-depth profile on each artist by the international and independent art critique, journalist, and lecturer, Laurie Rojas.

Visitors are met with bizarre assemblages upon entering the museum. Maybe even alien, they’re headdresses, perhaps for ceremonial rituals of people anthropologists have yet to discover; or costumes for a fringe festival performance; or even for a contemporary interpretation of the 1967 broadway musical “Hair” – from a generation way before the artist was even born.

There are seashells and other ocean flotsam, feathers, fabric, eyeballs, taxidermy parts, teeth, hair, latex gloves, foam…to name a few items in the menagerie list of miscellaneous matter, with mysterious gobs and strands that are precariously built, stuck together, and mounted gravity defying on spindly stands.

Each one, there’re five of them by Olin Fritz, is captivating, detailed, front to back, side to side, up to down to underneath; they’re fun, dangerous, or frightening, depending on the occasion in which they are deployed.

Another strangeness waits on the other side of the museum. A corridor space, painted dark and tunnel like is where Jocelyn Chase’s dramatically lit formations and monoliths rise up from the floor and jutting out from the wall.

Reminded me of going caving in West Virginia hills where only light is from our head lamps. Navigating Chase’s installation like traversing those damp underground caverns filled with other worldly shapes and forms, each colored and textured from eons of mineral buildup; except in Chase’s formations are of industrial stuﬀ – fiberglass, styrofoam, and layered with resins, enamel and automotive paint, shredded tires, felting, marble dusts…all filtered through generations of human existence.

An experience far from childhood stuﬀed animals, yet intriguing, sitting in the dark contemplating these aggressive structures from the Anthropocene Age.

Intersecting these two spaces are CAM’s East and West Galleries. Looking from an architectural plan view, one could draw out lines crossing these four spaces creating a compass, appropriately representing points in these artists’s journeys ahead, with all the symbolic and mythic meaning the cardinal directions imply.

In this compass configuration, Fritz’s entry space would point North and Chase’s cave space, South. In the East Gallery (now named Lee & Victor Leavengood Gallery) are artists Michael Lonchar and Tom Rosenow; and the West Gallery are artists Adrian Gomez and Emily Martinez.

The Lee & Victor Leavengood Gallery featuring the work of Michael Lonchar and Tom Rosenow, with additional work by Jocelyn Chase along the back wall.

Michael Lonchar, Gone Fishing, Out for a Swim.

Looking east, suspended in the middle of the gallery is Michael Lonchar’s singular “Gone Fishing, Out for a Swim”. Hung at an incline, chains and giant cartoonish hooks grapple a structure in what might be in the framing phase of construction.

There’re twelve identical 2×4 pine frames connected like pages of a pop-up book opening, stretching out. A coﬃn shape, a memento mori void extending through the center of each page, with what resembles the hull of a boat suspended within.

This whole rectangle structure could be an apparatus for philosophical inquiry. It is a telescope looking up from one end to a boundless vastness; viewing down from the other direction becomes a microscope searching the quantum foundations of this existence; and from the sides are segmented views of the boat hull floating somewhere between these extremes of scale, between beginnings and endings, between birth and death.

Tom Rosenow’s printmaking prowess surrounds Lonchar’s two-by-four geometry. Massive cyanotypes dominating one side of the gallery, and another anchoring the opposite side, his thirteen prints, a mixture of traditional and modern print making techniques, draw a linear landscape around the gallery walls.

Rosenow’s works, collapse and condenses images sourced from the digital world of social media that inundates many of our lives. He captures the relentless barrage of images and video stills and curates into compositions for possible longer internal reflections.

The internet with its speed and reach may be unique to this current time, but the gathering and spreading of thoughts, ideas, discoveries, inventions – culture in general, have always migrated with humans around this planet. Setting precedence was Japanese ukiyo-e block prints in the 17th century with their popularity that even influence a distant artists like van Gogh is one example.

Rosenow merging technologies from diﬀerent eras into one collage moment to tell age old stories of human elegance and foibles is another example.

Only three works in the seemingly sparse West Gallery, but their monumentality and dense complexity confidently fills the space, one anchoring the floor and the other holding up the walls. A note on continuity: Prior to this exhibition, in early 2025, CAM hosted X Factor: Latinx Artists and the Reconquest of the Everyday. What is now in this gallery could be a progression of that.

West Gallery featuring the work of Emily Martinez (left) and Adrian Gomez (right).

Parked on the floor is Adrian Gomez’s giant mobile street vendor cart, “Bisagras” as it says on the exhibition signage, though the exhibition catalogue titled it “Ni de aquí, ni de allá”. One translates as “hinge”, and the other “not from here, not from there”. This duality might express Gomez’s pivotal identity and intensions of his art.

With LED’s running and side awnings open, the cart is loaded with “merchandise” ready for market. Religious statuettes lined up in rows, indigenous pots, Mexican style mortars filled with various ingredients. Interestingly, a number of articles have been written on museums being the contemporary sacred space, inheriting roles churches used to provide as a place for quiet contemplation, reverence for the objects within, and potential transcendence experiences. Gomez’s cart of religious statutes and secular objects playing a double role?

There’s also a film projecting on the back awning following a drive around dusty dirt roads through ranch or farm country; and the sets of towing ball hitches on every side, presenting a conundrum on how this cart can be pulled, and more importantly, which direction.

Emily Martinez’s *the soft edge of a sword* (left) and *Pietra* (right).

Emily Martinez’s two massive works, “Pieta”, a charcoal drawing on paper; and “the soft edge of a sword”, an acrylic on canvas painting; references old masters use of imageries, symbolisms, figures, and hierarchical compositions speaking to this contemporary world.

“Pieta” recreates a religious theme that a number of artists have depicted with Michelangelo’s version being the most famous. There’re seven figures in Martinez’s interpretation, with herself playing each role, and the Virgin Mary here wears a cowboy hat. Her own Cowboy Carter.

The “the soft edge of a sword” is commanding, a clash of circus characters in costumes charging each on unique breeds of horses while an array of bodies, characters and creatures in both foreground and distant fantastical landscape, Hieronymous Bosch-esque, playing out allegorical scenes of love, struggles, cautionary tales…

No doubt many challenges building up to this exhibition, and the brilliant job of installation, which unfortunately has such a short schedule. But it is a grand send-oﬀ, and will be interesting to follow each artist’s progress – their hero’s journey.

As part of their exhibition program, CAM creates a self guided virtual tour of every exhibition, in part as a documentation record, and in part for outreach. It’s nice to be able to view the exhibitions from other parts of the world, or even after their closing. Here’s the link to the on-line virtual tour for this exhibition: https://cam.usf.edu/CAM/exhibitions/2025_04_MFA2025/MFA2025.html
A digital version of the Thank You in Advance 2025 MFA Thesis Exhibition catalogue is also available for downloading at the same link.

About the author:

A multi-talented artist, designer and writer, Tony Wong Palms has exhibited locally and also writes for Creative Pinellas Magazine. He is the former Exhibitions Coordinator/Designer at the University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum in Tampa, FL. All photographs courtesy of the author.

An exhibition of works by Ry McCullough

by Tony Wong Palms

Pausing at the entrance, taking in what is in front of me, many things come to mind when walking into Gallery114@HCC at the School of Visual and Performing Arts on the Ybor City campus and encountering the works of Ry McCullough.

Ry McCullough, Themes for the American Kestrel, installation view.
Image courtesy of Gallery114@HCC Ybor City Campus.

There are three pedestals composed in the middle of the floor, each covered with little objects, some with oddly familiar shapes, like Claes Oldenburg’s monumental sculptures that more or less resemble everyday things, except these are in sizes that can easily fit inside a coat pocket; there’s a video showing the same stuff in a smaller, but ever-changing grouping, the setting like a photographer’s studio; there are framed mixed media works hung on the wall, each depicting a landscape with a scattering of these objects; and finally there’re two small shelves, each with a rectangular box made delicately from Japanese paper, sitting on a greenish felt, like architectural models of some basic structural forms.

The pedestals could be an archipelago, a small group of islands with colored and differently shaped things that washed in from the sea, and the wind blew them around and around to end up where they are now, curios.

And taking a walk on these island shores, kicking around at your feet, these shaped and color things, maybe they are sea shells, or sand smoothed pebbles, perhaps pieces of coral, but most definitely flotsam and jetsam telling tales of their long transformative voyage through the ocean waves, when a glint of something catches your eye and you pick it up, examine it, drop it in your pocket, take it home, place it on a shelf, or window sill, or the end table, alongside all the other odds and ends that have been collected from here and there over the years, and now together they all are, in the same time and space, more or less coexisting, little islands in of themselves.

A friend comes and visits and they might admire your collection, picks one up, studies it, puts it back, but not quite the same spot or orientation; or maybe it’s cleaning day, and the objects are lifted one by one, dusted and put back, and again, not all returned to the exact same position. The arrangement thus shifts slightly, hardly noticeable, and continues shifting one cleaning day after another, one friend’s exploratory hands after another.

This constant picking up and putting back is essentially the 20 minutes long video piece. With the magic of video editing, pieces suddenly pop in and out of existence, creating a slightly different composition with each editing cut. One piece may go poof and reappear in a little while next to something else, or maybe never appear again. The viewer’s brow tense with concentrated anticipation. Did someone just get kidnapped, or is this an example of what physicists call entanglement? Who knew such unassuming objects appearing and disappearing could create such a drama. A suspenseful video performance where the artist is unseen.

The framed works on the wall is non-action action in a flat space. There’s a line, could be a table’s edge or the horizon, plane of the sky meets plane of the earth, but unlike the objects on the pedestals or in the video where they’re visibly grounded, the objects in these mixed media pieces feel suspended, while not as high as the floating bowler hat men in a René Magritte painting, they are not as affected by the gravity that anchors their pedestal counterparts.

Within each frame is a vignette of possibilities. They are very precise and elegant, exuding a calm to the videos’ caprice. Its stillness belies conscious intentions and subtleties of movement, like a person in meditation, where meditation is a deliberate act, as in the long wave of the tsunami, its motion unseen, or unrecognized until it momentously meets the shore.

The exhibition is titled Themes for the American Kestrel. There’s a curious group of objects way up on one of the gallery’s architectural ledges, next to the title wall, with one of the objects resembling a bird, watching all that’s below. This little vignette does not have a title or exhibition label, nor is it acknowledged anywhere else, and being high above eye level, could be easily missed.

Perhaps the zen like statement from the artist in the exhibition brochure may explain this apparition high on the ledge: “I sit and the bird arrives or the bird sits and I arrive, or not.”, or maybe it’s the meaning of the exhibition title, or both, or neither.

The exhibition brochure, designed like one of the framed wall works, is very handsome, includes a meaningful quote from Virginia Woolf, with the opening phrases: “How much better is silence; the coffee cup, the table. How much better to sit by myself like the solitary sea-bird that opens its wings on the stake….”

Following this is a brief artist statement outlining his ideas and intentions. Towards the end of the statement, McCullough references the artist Giorgio Morandi and his still-life paintings as a counterpoint to the evolving compositions in his video piece.

Morandi (1890-1964) lived his whole life in Bologna, Italy, where for the last 40 or so years of his artistic practice he maintained a singular focus on regimented compositions of bottles, vases, and similarly shaped and size objects, painted with subtle hues and tone gradations. It is an ascetic discipline, like a monk repeating a mantra, like Sol LeWitt’s endless iterations of the skeletal cube. The subtlest of details and changes are noticed with potential significance, like when physicists discovering an elemental particle, or that tiny chili pepper altering the flavor makeup of an entire dish.

If Morandi’s 40 years could be compressed into a 20 minutes time-lapse video, the result might be something like McCullough’s own video performance. Of course, a time-lapse video skips over many moments and details. But what is 40 years or 20 minutes, barely a nanosecond within a razor-thin sliver of a rock layer tucked in a stratum of the earth’s crust in the expanse of geologic time.

The exhibition is open to the public by appointment through June 24, 2021. For additional information about the gallery visit the Galleries at HCC website.

Ry McCullough received his MFA in Printmaking and Book Arts from the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia. He is an Associate Professor of Art and Design at the University of Tampa in Tampa, FL.

Tony Wong Palms is the Exhibitions Coordinator/Designer at the University of South Florida Contemporary Art Museum in Tampa, FL.