Concept // As the collaborative, Wilderless, John Orth and Alan Calpe use their site’s proximity to the Tampa Port Authority as provocation. Their video deconstructs the pleasure cruise experience into a series of vignettes highlighting the signifiers of this journey. Broken champagne bottles, backstage preparations of sequinned performers, towering edible centerpieces (amongst other things) are re-imagined and taken out of context to reveal both their absurdity and inherent charm. Wilderless imposes its own fantasy onto the meticulously constructed fantasy that is the modern pleasure cruise.
Bios // John Orth splits his time between Gainesville, Florida, where he tends to a succulent garden and a band named Holopaw on the Subpop record label and Brooklyn, NY where he fleshes out his many creative projects. On any given day, his house is give over to various whittlings, delicate stippled drawings and stacks of song lyics scrawled on Steno pads.
// Alan Calpe is a video artist living in Brooklyn, NY and Gainesville, Florida. His work combines digital and hand-oriented animation to emphasize the body’s presence (both materially and conceptually) in the creation of the fantastic. Narratives are propelled by disruptions into the imaginary, equating physical transformations to psychic negotiations with culture at play in queerness. Its performance is ambivalent, occupying desires for “fitting in” while suggesting its incompatibility.
Cadillac Beach is a musical installation that investigates how cars occupy space physically and sonically. The work consists of three Cadillac Escalades parked along a public street. Audio recordings of whale-song are slowed down to approximate the bass of urban dance music.
The Sea of Our Empty Hearts Here Manifest is a torch song, an elegy and a memorial. The work is a celebration and a party and the celebration of ending a party. The work is an empty room and a T.
Bio // The Fluff Constructivists (St.Paul,MN/Tampa,FL/Nagano, JAPAN) work in a markedly diverse manner with an emphasis on quiet activism and public provocation with the intent of restoring the fragile yet transformational sheen of fiction in everyday life.
Thunderstorm Machines 1, 2 and 3 : The three sculptural objects are rarified embodiments of the natural processes present in the typical electrical storm. Great amounts of energy are unleashed every time such a storm occurs and in our geographical location this is not unusual. The installation therefore represents a common event with extraordinary implications, often overlooked because of the local frequency of such storms.
Bio // Joe Griffith lives and works in Tampa, FL. He received his BFA from Parsons School of Design/ New School for Social Research in 1994. Since 1995, the artist has shown projects nationally and internationally at institutions including the Tampa Museum of Art, Diverseworks (Houston, TX), and Locust Projects (Miami, FL). In 1997, Griffith founded the research group and artist collective Experimental Skeleton, Inc. Projects with the group include stage props for the band The Genitortureres (Machine Love Tour of Japan) and the Lotus Fire Sculptures (2000-2001) commissioned by the City of St. Petersburg. In July 2005 Griffith founded Flight 19, an Experimental Skeleton project. Flight 19 is a curatorial laboratory in partnership with the city of Tampa that has gained a reputation for cutting edge exhibitions and collaborative framework. Currently, the artist is researching the migratory patterns of turkey vultures to propose a monumental sculpture/roost for the City of Tampa.
Concept // This video installation uses ostrich feathers as a projection screen for their own genetic code. Her work addresses the divide between different systems of representation, using a physical material as a vehicle for the conceptual description of itself.
Bio // Meg Mitchell creates work in diverse media from video, to performance, digital media and interactive installations. She uses humor to subvert modernist beliefs, and to play with the boundaries between the conceptual and the physical spaces her work occupies. Mitchell borrows from a diverse range of sources such as Greek drama, contemporary advertising, camp, cinema, art history, and media representations of technological progress. Her collaborative exhibition last year at the DC Art Center entitled "Ian and Jan: the Undiscovered Duo" was widely praised in the press including reviews in the Washington Post. She is currently a faculty member in the Department of Art at Florida State University.
Dreams: Untitled (click image for video)
We all have dreams. Whether it be a dream one dreams at night, day dreams, dreams for the future. How do our dreams differ or are they so different from one another? This project documents, interprets and presents the different faces of our dreams.
Concept // The Bay Opened Before Them: an approximately seven-minute video projection that depicts animated images of a ship moving across the sea. The video will also include subtitles that narrate both the voyage across the sea, and the ship’s arrival in America. The text will be taken from accounts of Ponce de Leon, Hernando de Soto and other early travelers to the Tampa Bay area. The text will vividly describe the voyage, the traveler’s early thoughts upon arrival, and the dense vegetation of the bay area. The narrative will stop short of the moment when the voyagers make landfall, and will loop back to the beginning – where they are again traveling across the open ocean.
The Artist is a larger than life projection of the hands honors the manual trade of the original citizens of the city of Tampa. The repeating of the hand rolling cigars mimics the amount of cigars each "artist" completed on a daily basis. The audio of the voice as “El Lector” reveals the curiosity, intelligence and engagement of the Cuban, Italian and American workers.
Bios // Anat Pollack is Professor of Digital Video and Electronic Arts at the University of South Florida and an installation artist living in Tampa, Florida USA. She is interested in interactivity through real-time digital processing in the installation setting. Combining old technologies with new, she is interested in engaging memory/nostalgia with the present.
Time in relation to memory is a constant theme in her research as she works to simulate the human experience using digital and mechanical systems. She is specifically interested in the way that our memory functions, and the difference between human and machine information processing.
Recent shows include the NewMediaFest 2007, Cinematheque, Cologne/Germany, directed and curated by Wilfried Agricola de Cologne; New Forms Festival, Vancouver British Columbia, Canada; Data Poesis, Snow Mass Colorado; The Bridge Art Fair at Miami Art Basel; M.I.A.D Venado Tuerto 2006 Muestra Internacional de Arte Digital, Argentina; SPARK Festival, Weissman Art Museum, in Minneapolis, Minnesota; Showtel in Palm Beach, Florida; the VII Salon de Arte Digital, at the Centro Pablo de la Torriente Brau, Havana, Cuba and RSVP Words, Images, and the Framing of Social Reality Conference, New School, Manhattan, NY.
// Robb Fladry is a new media artist working with video and sound in a variety of ways, including installation, performance and live improvisation.
Fladry has been called “one of the most prominent up and coming artists coming out of the Tennessee area,” and his work was recently featured in the Frist Center for the Visual Arts exhibit Future/Now in Nashville. His video work has been included in the Perpetual Art Machine in New York City, the BEA Festival for Media Arts in Las Vegas, Nevada, FILE: Rio in Sao Paulo, Brazil and the Digital Fringe Festival in Melbourne, Australia.
Fladry holds a BFA in Studio Arts from Austin Peay State University, and a MA in Communication Arts/Theatre from the same institution. Fladry performs in the VJ duo [ fladry + jones ]
Concept // In the midst of one of the largest recessions in history, money is on all of our minds. This work’s aim is to provide a series of solutions for what to do with our money after it has become completely worthless.
Bio // Mike Reynolds makes interdisciplinary work, often in the public eye, in the hopes of engaging people in a dialogue that is socially relevant and entertaining. He lives and works in Tampa, FL.
A Song from the Everyday is a work from Wes Wetherington's Zoetrope series. Developed in 2008, this piece repetitively glitches its way to a gestural stopping point- breaking up and transforming the narrative thread of its original source such that it becomes a meditation on the recursion of everday life.
Wesley Wetherington is an emerging Video artist known for his work dealing with the structural re-arrangement of time, space and gesture. His work is indicative of current trends in New Media including the involvement of non-linear editing and a general proclivity towards working with the aesthetics of post-production. Wetherington seeks to break new ground, taking the repetitive, rhythmic loops typical of both Pfeiffer and Reich and transforming them into a larger scheme. Dealing with both the residual effect of film convention and the traumatic staccato of short gestural loops, Wetherington creates a new composite whole from sources that are not the least bit random but are, in fact, entirely intentional. Wesley Wetherington was born in San Lorenzo, Puerto Rico and raised in Tampa, Fl. He is now an emerging video artist based in Tampa, Fl where he attended The University of South Florida for both his undergraduate and graduate degrees in Studio Art.
