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Location, Location, Location

Location, Location, Location
Anthony Record and the Museum of Florida Art and Culture

by Jonathan Talit

Driving to Avon Park is just that: driving to Avon Park. The 50-mile stretch of US-27, between the southbound exit on I-4 and the northwest border of Highlands County, begins packed with strip malls, gas stations, and fast-food chains: the trademark scenery of any highway exit. The deeper one drives, the less frequently these landmarks appear until there is nothing to look at but grass, sky, and asphalt. Yet, I couldn’t help but look out even more; to open my eyes wider as the flat land pulled itself closer to the horizon and the sky bent around my windows so dramatically that it appeared to dig at the edges of the earth. It was difficult to imagine people living anywhere near here. Not out of snobbery: it just, quite literally, looked so empty of people.

Of course, that’s not true. People do live in Highlands County and many have for generations. Even more visit to celebrate acute passions: the Mobil 1 Twelve Hours of Sebring car race, sold-out concerts by Rumours, a renowned Fleetwood Mac tribute band, the charming trompe l’oeil murals of Lake Placid, and Toby’s Clown School and Museum. The latter has graduated more than 1,500 clowns since its founding in 1993. Despite appearing sparse, or perhaps because of it, Highlands County is sprinkled with various sites of assembly.

The Museum of Florida Art and Culture, or MOFAC, is one such site. Part of South Florida State College, MOFAC hired Anthony Record as its new curator in March of 2022. Since then, Record has been busy organizing contemporary art exhibitions and managing MOFAC’s permanent collection of historic art and artifacts pertaining to the region. I met with Anthony on a Saturday afternoon, at the pristine campus of SFSC, just two weeks shy of Hurricane Ian pummeling the state, to discuss his new role.

Anthony Record, Curator of the Museum of Florida Art and Culture. Photo: J. Talit

“I’ll show you the concourse, first,” he said as he ushered me inside. The main exhibition space is divided into quadrants (quintets if you include the lobby of the Board Room). The main gallery has two sections: one for contemporary art exhibitions and one for the permanent collection. The third section is the lobby of the music hall.

The fourth is the concourse, which is within the building but outside of the main gallery. It consists of a large, curved wall that follows a hallway between the main gallery and classrooms. Several long canvases line the wall. Technically, they’re canvas prints: reproductions of oil paintings by the artist Christopher Still. The originals are on display at the Florida House of Representatives. Each print depicts some aspect of Florida in a style akin to history painting. The commanding gaze of Seminole Indian Osceola aims at the viewer in Patriot and Warrior (2001). Each hand gestures with conviction: one towards the sunset and an approaching Spanish vessel, the other gripped around a knife that pierces into a written document. This document “hangs” over the edge of the painting in a trompe l’oeil effect like the aforementioned murals at Lake Placid. An enormous alligator’s claws dangle over the borders of The Okeehumkee on the Oklawaha (2000). Each painting is concerned with narrative, landscape, and perspective: visual and historical.

Christoper Still. *Patriot and Warrior*, 2001. Canvas print.
The original is on display at the Florida House of Representatives in Tallahassee, Florida.

Anthony Record’s curatorial interests are similar. “I don’t organize exhibits with a strict, pre-existing philosophy or ideology, like ‘I’m interested in shows about identity’ or ‘I only focus on work by abstract artists,” he explains. “However, many of the exhibitions I organize seem to involve place. Location matters a lot to me and to many of the artists I exhibit.”

Location has mattered to Record personally, too. Originally from Tampa, Record received his bachelor’s from the University of South Florida. After earning his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2008, he returned to Tampa and has maintained proactive roles in the arts since. Most notably, Record is Co-founder and Director of the artist collective QUAID, which recently moved to Ybor City after almost a decade in Seminole Heights. Along with exhibition spaces like Tempus Projects and Parallelogram Gallery, QUAID was part of a community of enthusiastic, DIY artists and educators who promoted contemporary art in a city that was otherwise lacking.

Record complemented his executive role at QUAID with educational positions, adjuncting at the University of South Florida as well as various community colleges from 2010 to 2018. “I love teaching, but I definitely prefer teaching at community colleges,” he confesses. “The students tend to be more diverse in every way: age, socioeconomics, political affiliation, level of background. All the students are interested in art but tend to be less interested in credentials. They also tend to push back a little more, which often makes for a richer classroom experience.”

In 2018, Record stopped adjuncting to assume a full-time role at the Tampa Museum of Art. While no longer a professor in a college classroom, Record worked in the education department as the Studio Programs Coordinator, where he organized after-hours classes hosted by local artists. Children and adults alike would attend these classes to participate in a wide range of making. “The classes were only a few hours long, so they had to be engaging but concise. The topics depended on whichever artist hosted the event. They could range from self-portraits in acrylic to large-scale collage to simply paper sculpture.”

Record left his position at the TMA earlier this year to become the curator at MOFAC. “The job at MOFAC has several moving parts, which I enjoy,” he says. “The most obvious are the contemporary artist exhibitions. Artwork that involves Florida, whether the artist is a homegrown Floridian or not, doesn’t have much institutional presence. The same is true of general Florida history and archaeology. I know a lot of great artists whose work deals with this state and deserves the kind of authority and attention that an institutional solo show can offer. To pair those works side by side with objects of Floridian craft and archaeology, which have very different cultural and intellectual histories than art with a capital “A,” makes MOFAC an exciting exhibition space.”

Considering Record’s noted contributions to the Tampa Bay art scene, contributions about which several people have expressed their gratitude in casual conversations with me about Record, one wonders: why leave? Avon Park is not as far from Tampa as, say, Las Vegas, but it’s still a hike. Culturally, they’re almost polar opposites. Tampa, specifically the art scene of which Record is a notable architect, is “cool.” Under no circumstances is Avon Park. To my knowledge, Record previously knew no one in Highlands County. “The position at MOFAC popped up and seemed like a good opportunity,” he concludes.

Succinct, polite, evasive. I press, albeit gently, and like any schlocky interviewer, I make it about myself. I mention that I’ve moved around a lot for school and residencies. Within two months of meeting with Anthony, I had left a yearlong residency in Star, North Carolina to pursue a full-time job in Orlando, a city I hate in the lamest way possible. I have some family and acquaintances in Orlando, but not the community I had in Star, Tampa, or Boston. Being an artist grants you the flexibility to hop to new places and meet new groups of people, but it doesn’t make leaving them behind, if only by a few hours, any easier.

He agrees and elaborates on his decision. “I guess that the position at MOFAC seemed like a full-time version of my role at QUAID: providing young, hungry, interesting, local artists with exhibition space for their work. I’ve had mixed feelings about some of the places I’ve shown my work. As an exhibiting artist, I had a lot of disappointments with various galleries and museums; just the things that weren’t provided and the level of engagement with my work that I was hoping to get but didn’t. I hope that I can use those experiences to cultivate an exhibition space that is both more attentive to the needs of artists while also staying out of their way.”

Whatever cocktail of circumstances led to Record’s decision, MOFAC is clearly lucky to have him. In just six months, Record has served himself a full plate: reorganizing the collection, changing the floorplan of the contemporary art galleries, securing future solo shows, writing exhibition didactics, planning gallery events, and developing an online presence via video interviews with exhibiting artists. These videos, crispy produced, are separate interviews with artists Bruce Marsh and Sam Newton, whose respective solo exhibitions A Long Glance and Herd of Thunder opened in early October of 2022 (Both exhibitions have since closed.) Marsh was a longtime professor at the University of South Florida and Newton is a current member of QUAID.

The videos are not just methods by which the museum can advertise online, however. They’re also not just interpretation tools for the viewer to glean deeper insights into the work, though they do that well. Record conducted these interviews and edited the videos, and his signature appetite for “place” is all over them. While Marsh and Newton discuss their interests and aspirations outright, each video underscores the setting in which these artists make art and presents a synopsis of their daily working life.

Granted, Bruce Marsh explicitly discusses how his home of Ruskin, Florida defines his work. What the video presents that isn’t immediately visible upon looking at Marsh’s work or listening to him speak is the kind of life that would produce such work: a contemplative life of teaching, commuting, and now retirement. Marsh moved to Ruskin as a compromise between he and his wife, Dolores Coe. She was teaching at the Ringling College of Art and Design and he was teaching at USF. Thus, the rural town of Ruskin was the middle point of their commutes.

Installation view of the exhibition *Bruce March: A Long Glance* which was on display from October 5 – November 18, 2022.

Marsh’s paintings indicate someone who spends a lot of time looking around at the same things: the outlet malls off I-75, a brewing afternoon storm on the horizon, an intersection at sunset on the way home from work. What most of us would tune out, Marsh isolates and lovingly renders but without hyperbole. Instead, he purposely portrays them as what they are: ordinary, without exaggeration. One’s attention is drawn to these paintings because of their elegant execution of space, not because they depict recognizable people or distort the everyday into a spectacle. But when Record’s camera cuts from Marsh and lingers on an empty bridge or the charmingly dilapidated Ruskin Drive-In, neither of which are the subjects of Marsh’s paintings, the audience is handed more insight than anything Marsh could say out loud.

Installation view of the exhibition *Bruce Marsh: A Long Glance* which was on display from October 5 – November 18, 2022.

Since Sam Newton’s paintings aren’t really about location at all, Record’s focus on place is even more exposed in her video interview. Newton’s paintings have backgrounds, but they’re simplified to emphasize attention on the real subjects: horses, presented in all their buxom glory. Unlike Marsh, Newton isn’t interested in playing with perspectival space and ordinary locations. Newton’s interests, instead, lie in anthropomorphism and a comic sensibility akin to the infamous Foot of Cupid from Monty Python or the flat irony of stick-and-poke tattoos. Newton compresses her horses barely within the edges of the canvas to articulate just how robust, knobby, temperamental, vigorous, and fragile they really are.

Complicated creatures. And that’s just the artwork itself. Like Marsh’s interview, the main subject of Newton’s video is the particular configuration of her working life (I won’t say “work-life balance”). Unlike Marsh, Newton lives in trendy Seminole Heights but has no dedicated studio in her home, at least not one that we see. The generational contrast between the videos is sharp. Within the first minute, the viewer is presented with a domestic environment that is unmistakably Millennial. The living room, which doubles as Newton’s studio, is engulfed in potted plants, mostly palms. A slate gray housecat lounges on a cat scratcher that appears surprisingly manicured. A child’s cozy coupe outside is plastered with a bumper sticker that reads, in block print, “HONK IF YOU LOVE KING STATE.”

Another big difference: Newton has two young children. Julian, the oldest, doesn’t appear. The youngest, Valentine, unabashedly makes his presence known. Newton explains that she began these horse paintings during the COVID lockdowns and her subsequent pregnancy with Valentine. She admits that it’s easy for her to project onto horses because, “…they all have bangs.”

If only a little sarcasm covered our tracks like we hoped it would. Clearly, there are other reasons why vibrant horses in claustrophobic spaces might resonate with Newton: the pent-up isolation of COVID lockdowns? An analogy for pregnancy, where you share limited space with someone else? A representation of the compressed hours in a day of a working artist and mother? “[Acrylic paint] is a plastic so it’s drying faster, and it has a different texture [than oil paint],” she says, explaining her transition from using oils to acrylic. Newton loves how acrylic more readily accepts other media, from colored pencils to crayons to ink. Ostensibly, she’s come to prefer acrylic’s flexibility and expansiveness to oil’s stiffness. “The sky’s the limit,” she claims of acrylic. I object. More likely, it’s precisely the limits of acrylic that attracts Newton. Its swift drying time and uncomplicated working conditions provide a conclusiveness that she’s found compatible in her life. “I’m able to make work that I wouldn’t be able to make, in the speed that I make it, in the situation that I’m in right now,” she says, before glancing warmly over her shoulder at Valentine.

What provides me all this information, and what grants me a sense of access that, in turn, elicits some hubris within me to freely speculate about these artists’ lives, is Anthony Record’s quiet but guiding eye. Editing, directing, curating, producing: all these jobs require clear decision-making with as little trace of the author as possible. At least, that’s been Record’s hope for himself as curator at MOFAC. So far, it appears he’s succeeded. In six months, a set of interests and a graceful sensibility for articulating them has already emerged. The towns we decide to live in, our hours spent on the road or in offices, the slivers we carve out of our days to do the things we really want to do, the people with whom we choose to spend our “off” time: all the pragmatic compromises we make and their effects on creative work are under Record’s nonjudgmental microscope.

The Museum of Florida Art and Culture (MoFAC) is located on the campus of South Florida State College in Avon Park, Florida.

I’m sure Record’s recent move, like mine, feeds these interests even more. Like it or not, tradeoffs between work and life must be made. Like the artists he exhibits, Record has made a tradeoff that works well for him. Avon Park supplies the tranquility for focus and Record supplies the faithful attention to detail. With QUAID, Record is happily one of several making executive decisions. At MOFAC, he’s largely driving solo.

Bay Art Files contributor Jonathan Talit is an artist currently based in Orlando. He received his BFA from Boston University and recently received his MFA from the University of South Florida, Tampa. He makes sculptures, essays, exhibitions, friends, fun, and occasionally money.

Visit mofac.org for more information about the Museum of Florida Art and Culture and its upcoming exhibitions and programming.

Click here to watch the YouTube archived videos on artists Bruce Marsh and Sam Newton.

Visit anthonyrecord.com for more information about Anthony Record.

Visit quaidgallery.com for more information about the Tampa-based artist collective QUAID.

Themes for the American Kestrel

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.

Setting the Table with Separate Checks

by James Cartwright

“The main appeal of the name is that it speaks to how an artist collective functions on exhibition night: one shared space with many distinct voices.” – Katelyn Montagna and Adam Mathieu

Separate Checks is an artist collective founded in the summer of 2018 by Katelyn Montagna and Adam Mathieu, who created the group to reconnect with friends and encourage each other to produce new work. Additional members include McKinna Anderson, Aaron Castillo, Krista Darling, Jonathon Dorofy, Anna Dunwody, Nabil Harb, Andres Ramirez, Erika Schnur, Kristy Summerson, and Jessica Thornton. Many members are University of South Florida alumni who came through the School of Art and Art History’s photography program or the School of Advertising and Mass Communications. It is easy to imagine that assembling the group’s roster had a definite “getting the band back together” feeling.

While the USF connection forms the backbone of Separate Checks, other artists have joined by contacting Adam and Katelyn on social media. Adam amusingly recalls how member Aaron Castillo slid into his DMs on Instagram before meeting with him and Katelyn in person. They describe the encounter as feeling like they were on a blind date with a photographer, but thankfully everyone clicked and the date did not end in awkwardness and disappointment.

Installation view of Narrative Nowhere exhibition at Gallery221.
Photography credit: Emiliano Settecasi.

The many distinct voices of Separate Checks will be in conversation with each other in Narrative Nowhere, showing at Hillsborough Community College’s Gallery221@HCC Dale Mabry from November 2 – December 10. Visitors are encouraged to view the show in person, by making an appointment on the Gallery221 website and following guidelines on social distancing. Originally slated to debut this spring, it is yet another exhibition that was postponed because of the coronavirus. The show’s change in schedule also led to a change in content, as the extended timing allowed artists to respond to their experiences over the past eight months of this turbulent year.

The initial concept of Narrative Nowhere was to invite other artists to collaborate and reflect on personal histories and the geographic spread of the group, but some members have refocused on addressing Covid-19, racial tension in the United States, and the U.S. Presidential Election. The collective has worked in concert with Gallery221 director Amanda Poss to adjust to these atypical conditions and deliver a show well-suited for this cultural moment.

Andres Ramirez, *Muro Falso 1*, 2020, panoramic decal.
Photography credit: Emiliano Settecasi.

Andres Ramirez is one member whose work confronts the political, with the artist reacting to the Trump administration’s brutal border policies. His images in Narrative Nowhere are “about facades and what hides behind them; whether they’re digitally invented or not, these images are constructions much like the norms of our society.” This year he has been grappling with the concept of borders and their violently divisive nature, as he questions whether they should even exist.

Anna Dunwody, *Sempiternity I* and *Dioscorea bulbifera 1-5*, 2020, cyanotypes.
Photography credit: Emiliano Settecasi.

Anna Dunwody’s recent works tangle with themes of loss, discovery, and regrowth. Here she displays a series of cyanotypes that she created while in quarantine. She draws connections between the unpredictability of this year and her chosen media, musing that with cyanotypes “you can do everything with such care and intention and each one always comes out a little different and maybe not how you wanted or expected, much like life.” She says that in her work she seeks to find the constantly surprising and occasionally beautiful.

The current exhibition at HCC represents a major sign of growth for the young collective, who previously held one-night-only showings in venues like the Creative Loafing Space and Dojo Sounds recording studio in Ybor. Those events emitted a special “blink-and-you’ll-miss-it” energy, where it was exciting to see a show in an unfamiliar space and not already know everyone there. However, Adam is thankful for the opportunity to display work in a fixed space like Gallery221, where the group can reach a wider audience and their works are given ample time and room to breathe.

The Main Course one-night-only show held at the Creative Loafing Space in 2018. Image taken by Anna Dunwody.

Why join an artist collective in the first place? For McKinna Anderson, the group offers her friendship and a sense of accountability, without being restrictive or stifling her voice. Living in Nashville in 2018, she knew Adam and Katelyn from her time as an undergrad at USF and she found herself wandering through a similar post-graduate fog until she joined Separate Checks. She explains that the group has a tethering effect, acting as a lighthouse that always leads her back to the art community.

Separate Checks logo designed by Jonathon Dorofy

The group’s identity is still in flux, but it adopts several traits from its founders. Adam’s Fine Art background blends with Katelyn’s graphic and advertising skillset to produce something with an art school sensibility and savvy self-promotion. The mixing of elements is persistent among the membership, with both Aaron Castillo and Kristy Summerson moving between the Fine Art and advertising worlds. Member Jonathon Dorofy is also heavily involved with the group’s branding, where he imbues quintessential Florida motifs with a sleek veneer and graceful simplicity.

In a subtle way, the collective also has a quiet confidence that reflects Adam’s and Katelyn’s personalities, wherein his calm demeanor and her animated enthusiasm form a perfect partnership.

Separate Checks is currently finding its place in the Tampa Bay art community alongside established collectives like QUAID and the photography-centered Fountain of Pythons. USF photography professor Wendy Babcox is a member of FOP, and Katelyn remembers being intrigued by the group when Babcox mentioned it in class. Babcox’s guidance has had a lasting impact on Adam and Katelyn, and they single her out as an important mentor from their undergraduate days. Additionally, FOP member Selina Roman also serves as a member of Gallery221’s Advisory Council, and she proposed the Narrative Nowhere show to HCC. She was one of the earliest and most ardent supporters of Separate Checks, and she continues to offer her encouragement on its ventures.

What is next on the menu for the young collective? The group plans to eventually host a juried show, and they have kicked around the idea of having their own permanent exhibition space. They are becoming friendly with other artists collectives such as Portland’s Small Talk Collective and are discussing a show exchange and curating each other’s work. For now, they seem content with taking things as they come and not looking too far ahead.

When it comes to Separate Checks, part of the excitement is in not knowing what comes next. For many viewers, the Narrative Nowhere exhibition is likely their first exposure to the group. This show provides a rare chance to see numerous artists creating work together in the early stages of their careers. These separate voices are coalescing into something new right before our eyes. Don’t blink and miss the moment.

Narrative Nowhere runs from November 2 to December 10 at Gallery221@HCC Dale Mabry campus. To learn more about the gallery and make an appointment to view the exhibition, follow these links:

https://www.hccfl.edu/campus-life/arts/galleries-hcc/gallery221

https://outlook.office365.com/owa/calendar/Gallery221HCC@hccfl.onmicrosoft.com/bookings/

To learn more about Separate Checks, visit their official website:

https://www.sepchecks.com/

James Cartwright earned his M.A. in Art History from USF in 2017. He focuses on cross-cultural exchanges in art production, while occasionally wandering into the realm of contemporary art criticism. He is an adjunct Art History instructor at USF and the University of Tampa, where he uses his liberal arts background to joyfully corrupt the impressionable youth of America.

Faces in the Crowd

By Sabrina Hughes

Miki Kratsman’s exhibition People I Met at the University of South Florida’s Contemporary Art Museum (USFCAM) is a challenging exhibition, but maybe not for the reasons you would think. Though it deals with the emotionally and politically charged subject matter of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the subject matter itself is blunt and direct, a presentation of visual facts. Miki Kratsman: People I Met doesn’t ask viewers to do much more than to look, and continue to look, even if it makes us uncomfortable.

Kratsman is an Argentinian-born Israeli photographer who began his career as a photojournalist before he began to exhibit in an artistic context. The photographs in the exhibition borrow the aesthetics and content of journalism but subtly transcend the strict ethics of non-interference that is the photojournalist’s code. One senses the presence of Kratsman’s own compassion to create work inviting viewers to take a prolonged look at faces and places that may be otherwise easily passed over with a glance.

Installation view of *Miki Kratsman: People I Met* at the University of South Florida’s Contemporary Art Museum. Photograph: Sabrina Hughes

The dominant work in the USFCAM galleries is the project that gives the exhibition its name. The installation People I Met in the Lee and Victor Leavengood Gallery is an ongoing (2010-2018) collaboration between Kratsman and the Palestinian individuals who have borne witness to and participated in the decades-long conflict. Two-thousand grainy portraits fill three gallery walls, a scale that is challenging to describe and overwhelming to experience. Some people are looking straight at the camera and some gaze elsewhere. Kratsman’s source images are his own photographs from his career as a photojournalist, from 1993 to 2012. He delves into his archives to look behind the central subject matter and to create new images that isolate the faces of the countless bystanders.

Installation view of the exhibition *Miki Kratsman: People I Met* at the University of South Florida’s Contemporary Art Museum. Photograph: Sabrina Hughes

Detail of the installation of the exhibition *Miki Kratsman: People I Met* at the University of South Florida’s Contemporary Art Museum. Photograph: Sabrina Hughes

The photos, and especially some of the expressions on the people’s faces, make me wonder what was happening in the foreground of the photos these were excerpted from. What are they witnessing–what is making them smile or shout? And to speak more broadly to their original context, what or who are we overlooking in the background of the billions of images that have already been made? Whose daily routines brought them into the path of some newsworthy event, and therefore into the frame of the photojournalist present to document it? What photos are you in, unknowingly? Who were you then and are you different now? Most importantly, who is interested in what happened to you after the shutter clicked?

The photos are not only intended to be seen on gallery walls, in fact, they were first disseminated digitally. Kratsman posts the excerpted portraits to a Facebook Page dedicated to the project. More than twenty-thousand followers of the page see the images and comment on the photos of people they know, people they knew, or sometimes photos they recognize as themselves. Kratsman is literally picking faces from the crowds dispersed years ago and crowdsourcing the reply to the question “Do you know who this person is and what is his condition right now?” In the exhibition, some of these responses from the Page’s followers have been engraved on brass plaques. “My teacher, he was in prison but now he is out.” “He was the best man in Jordan Valley. Now he is dead.”

The plaques are in conversation with the photographs but exist at a physical and interpretive remove from the anonymous portraits. We don’t know to whom the plaques refer. If any of the 2,000 individuals pictured in this iteration of People I Met have been identified, are dead or alive, or of unknown status, we viewers do not know. We are invited to consider the text and the image separately and perhaps to imagine more about the relationship between the sea of faces and the comparatively few who have been recognized and whose status is known.

Kratsman’s People I Met runs counter to the emotional distance photojournalists must cultivate in order to do their job. Photojournalists often face criticism for taking a picture of a heinous scene rather than trying to help the people they photograph. Kratsman’s project of attempting to follow the thread of each individual’s life forward from when their paths crossed, always asking if they are in good health when a Facebook follower recognizes a friend or family member is a heartening gesture.

If the installation People I Met magnifies the sense of scale by isolating so many individual faces each affected by the conflict, the video 70 Meters… White T-Shirt (2017) does the opposite and compresses the impact. The video is a montage of every weapon discharge in the small village of Nabi Salih over the course of one year. After the sound of every gunshot, a rapid cut to the sound of another gunshot. We don’t always see where the shot is coming from and thankfully we never see anyone hit by a bullet. Watching the video, it all seems too brief. The shots come quickly and without reprieve (literally rapid-fire) but the acceleration of all of these incidents into the span of fewer than nine minutes seems to reduce the impact that these violent engagements have on the residents of the town. A shot that may change a life irrevocably is decontextualized and shortened to the length of time that the sound reverberates on the video.

Displaced (2010) and Bedouin Archive (2015-2016), the other two projects in the exhibition document Bedouin life in the Negev desert and towns that are targeted for demolition. In Bedouin Archive, photographs of individuals and buildings in various states of demolition are identified only with the latitude, longitude, altitude, image direction, and time stamp. A document in the truest sense to record where Kratsman was and when, and what was in front of his camera at that moment. If the villages are demolished and people scattered, these photographs serve as a map of sorts to locate the inhabitants in a time and place that may be lost.

One of photography’s unique qualities in relation to other art media is its indexicality. Most photography operates on the principle that what the viewer sees on the print was at one time in front of the camera. Indexicality is photography’s mirror-like characteristic that most of us now take for granted; that which makes it possible to see photography as a presentation of facts, of truth. The person we see in the photo stood in front of the camera if only for a fraction of a second. These people were here. Some still are. I know that person, she is well. This building stood here at this time. This is what the village looked like. These are the sounds residents experienced regularly.

Once an artwork is released from the protected insularity of the artist’s studio into the world, the artist can no longer control its interpretation. Every individual who looks at a work brings her own subjective viewpoint and beliefs to bear. Remarkable in Kratsman’s work is his retention of a documentary viewpoint while treating such highly emotional and potentially polarizing subject matter. One does not engage in light discourse about Israeli-Palestinian relations. By its very nature, this body of work, in particular, has the potential to be highly polarizing. Yet, when in the gallery space, the exhibition seems instead to function as a document of life in this historical moment.

Kratsman’s photographs and videos open a space for questioning the monolithic perception of both Israeli and Palestinian identities and instead to think about the subjectivity of each person, photographer and photographed, as a sum of their experiences extending forward and backward in time from the split second recorded in the photograph.

Bay Art Files contributor Sabrina Hughes holds an M.A. in Art History from the University of South Florida, with a focus on the History of Photography. Hughes has worked at the National Gallery of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg and is an adjunct instructor at USF and is the founder and principal of photoxo, a personal archiving service specializing in helping people preserve their family photos. She also has an ongoing curatorial project, Picurious, which invests abandoned slides with new life. Follow her on Instagram @sabrinahughes for selfies, hiking, and dogs, and @thepicurious for vintage photos.

Miki Kratsman: People I Met is the first solo exhibition of this award-winning Israeli conceptual photographer to be presented in the United States and is on view at USFCAM through Saturday, December 8. It is the first exhibition organized by USFCAM’s newly appointed Curator-at-Large Christian Viveros-Fauné. A highly regarded international art critic and curator, Viveros-Fauné has also been named the 2018-2019 Kennedy Family Visiting Scholar at the USF School of Art and Art History.

RELATED EVENT: Film on the Lawn

Friday, November 16, 2018
6 PM
Free and open to the public.

USFCAM presents the award-winning documentary 5 Broken Cameras as part of their outdoor Film on the Lawn series. A first-hand account of non-violent resistance in the West Bank village of Bil’in, documented over a span of many years by Palestinian farmer Emad Burnat and then edited and co-directed by Israeli Guy Davidi, the documentary has been hailed as an important work of both cinematic and political activism. For more information about this free event, visit the Museum’s Facebook Event Page.

Faces in the Crowd

By Sabrina Hughes

RELATED EVENT: Film on the Lawn

Friday, November 16, 2018 6 PM Free and open to the public.

Friday, November 16, 2018
6 PM
Free and open to the public.