Death Poems, Feb 5-Feb 26
Death Poems is an exhibition curious about light, color, and tension—tension between the ambiguous and the clear, the vegetal and the digital, and the self and the other. These pieces are linked by an intrepid use of light and pigment to ask questions about the way we experience this peculiar moment in time.
A semiotic investigation of shape, color, wonkiness, and craft, Emiliano Settecasi’s Untitled (Icons, Buttons, Shapes, Hopes, Dreams) is loosely inspired by contemporary design but ultimately intuitively conceived. Working in papier-mâché, Settecasi embraces wobbly edges and lumpy surfaces, which imbue each shape with personality. Made largely from newspaper collected early in the COVID-19 pandemic, the sculptures reflect on artmaking and its purpose in afflicted times.
Neil Bender’s multimedia work probes fluid practices of gender and sexuality, recasting popular imagery to form a new interface for dialogue. These pieces are interested in spatial tension: images float in the negative space made by seductive fabric backgrounds, which extend like swaths of the cosmos. Fleshy pieces of collage, bits of tissue paper, cotton balls dusted in glitter—all are bodily facts wanting to exist in an ecstatic fantastical space.
Cynthia Mason’s soft sculptures envision particles of light deconstructed and reconfigured. They play with the imagined materiality of light—smearing it, speckling it, breaking it down––in a rearrangement that gestures to virtual streams of data, and explores the incoherence of our daily lives. Fragile and crudely sewn, the sculptures cast back the glitches and flickering of our unstable world.
The kaleidoscopic tapestries Look at me and Look at you are inspired by Elani Mia’s love of high fashion. Vivid colors and found imagery frame deep-set mirrors, which invite the viewer to consider their place within the artwork and in the ecosystem of industry, consumption, self-expression, and desire. Mia’s work challenges the condemnation of vanity, yet also explores the ways we absorb and recompose cultural themes in our own identities.
In his paintings, Anthony Record offers up an uncomfortably quiet arena for associations to burrow and bloom. Ghostlike lines bring to mind the primordial forms of the kudzu-covered trees that spill out of forests along Florida highways. The compositions engage with the sublime dread of deep time: the distant past and distant future feel concurrent in Florida’s shifting, stricken ecologies.
Sam Newton’s paintings and sculptures involve a strong sense of play and sensuality, using fleshy contours, textured surfaces, and the improbable image of entangled horses and serpents to subvert traditional self portraiture. Her work conveys frustration about language’s limited ability to express one’s interiority. Sometimes clumsy, sometimes suggestive, her horses and their agitated emotions become a caricature of the artist.
Justin Nelson’s drawings explore dystopian fantasies, American ennui, and the decline of empathy in the digital age. Death Poems invokes the mythic and the everyday, capturing an uncanny sense of dislocation––a feeling at once familiar and strange, domestic and unsettled. With an emphasis on line and experimentation, the work values careful composition and the compression of color.
Eleanor Eichenbaum’s sculpture Two Moments and An Aside creates tension and suspense with the fragility implied by delicate curves and precarious arches. Yet within the tension lies poise, balance, and introspection. The discrete forms interact to suggest a narrative of curiosity and unboundedness.
In collaboration with Rose Lambert-Sluder. A writer from Asheville, NC, Rose Lambert-Sluder received her MFA in fiction from the University of Oregon and writes short fiction and poetry.
A semiotic investigation of shape, color, wonkiness, and craft, Emiliano Settecasi’s Untitled (Icons, Buttons, Shapes, Hopes, Dreams) is loosely inspired by contemporary design but ultimately intuitively conceived. Working in papier-mâché, Settecasi embraces wobbly edges and lumpy surfaces, which imbue each shape with personality. Made largely from newspaper collected early in the COVID-19 pandemic, the sculptures reflect on artmaking and its purpose in afflicted times.
Neil Bender’s multimedia work probes fluid practices of gender and sexuality, recasting popular imagery to form a new interface for dialogue. These pieces are interested in spatial tension: images float in the negative space made by seductive fabric backgrounds, which extend like swaths of the cosmos. Fleshy pieces of collage, bits of tissue paper, cotton balls dusted in glitter—all are bodily facts wanting to exist in an ecstatic fantastical space.
Cynthia Mason’s soft sculptures envision particles of light deconstructed and reconfigured. They play with the imagined materiality of light—smearing it, speckling it, breaking it down––in a rearrangement that gestures to virtual streams of data, and explores the incoherence of our daily lives. Fragile and crudely sewn, the sculptures cast back the glitches and flickering of our unstable world.
The kaleidoscopic tapestries Look at me and Look at you are inspired by Elani Mia’s love of high fashion. Vivid colors and found imagery frame deep-set mirrors, which invite the viewer to consider their place within the artwork and in the ecosystem of industry, consumption, self-expression, and desire. Mia’s work challenges the condemnation of vanity, yet also explores the ways we absorb and recompose cultural themes in our own identities.
In his paintings, Anthony Record offers up an uncomfortably quiet arena for associations to burrow and bloom. Ghostlike lines bring to mind the primordial forms of the kudzu-covered trees that spill out of forests along Florida highways. The compositions engage with the sublime dread of deep time: the distant past and distant future feel concurrent in Florida’s shifting, stricken ecologies.
Sam Newton’s paintings and sculptures involve a strong sense of play and sensuality, using fleshy contours, textured surfaces, and the improbable image of entangled horses and serpents to subvert traditional self portraiture. Her work conveys frustration about language’s limited ability to express one’s interiority. Sometimes clumsy, sometimes suggestive, her horses and their agitated emotions become a caricature of the artist.
Justin Nelson’s drawings explore dystopian fantasies, American ennui, and the decline of empathy in the digital age. Death Poems invokes the mythic and the everyday, capturing an uncanny sense of dislocation––a feeling at once familiar and strange, domestic and unsettled. With an emphasis on line and experimentation, the work values careful composition and the compression of color.
Eleanor Eichenbaum’s sculpture Two Moments and An Aside creates tension and suspense with the fragility implied by delicate curves and precarious arches. Yet within the tension lies poise, balance, and introspection. The discrete forms interact to suggest a narrative of curiosity and unboundedness.
In collaboration with Rose Lambert-Sluder. A writer from Asheville, NC, Rose Lambert-Sluder received her MFA in fiction from the University of Oregon and writes short fiction and poetry.
Peaks & Valleys: Sketches for a Dark Ride
Alex Hickey, Elliott Stoeckinger, McKenzie Zalopany
Peaks & Valleys presents the work of three emerging artists in Tampa Bay who are experimenting with different modes of visual narrative, and eliminating the hierarchy between the observed and the imagined through drawing. Using animation, the visual language of urban sketching, and comics, they represent the extraordinary everyday as it has been permeated by the virtual realms of media, memory, and memes. Peaks & Valleys explores the fuzzy spaces between physical and digital drawing practices, original and existing intellectual property, and the factual and fictional to create protracted moments of empathy, discovery, and glee.
There is velocity, power, and potential in the sketch. The works in Peaks & Valleys remind us of the effectiveness and accessibility of drawing – its ability to give us a stronger sense of the character of people and places in the physical and virtual worlds, its function as a visualization of someone’s thought process, and its usefulness in our attempts to connect with the past and the present to open up new potentials for the future. In a binge-watch economy, movies and documentaries are stretched out to 10 streamable episodes. The artists in Peaks & Valleys tell good stories in one image.
Curated by Anthony Record
Alex Hickey, Elliott Stoeckinger, McKenzie Zalopany
Peaks & Valleys presents the work of three emerging artists in Tampa Bay who are experimenting with different modes of visual narrative, and eliminating the hierarchy between the observed and the imagined through drawing. Using animation, the visual language of urban sketching, and comics, they represent the extraordinary everyday as it has been permeated by the virtual realms of media, memory, and memes. Peaks & Valleys explores the fuzzy spaces between physical and digital drawing practices, original and existing intellectual property, and the factual and fictional to create protracted moments of empathy, discovery, and glee.
There is velocity, power, and potential in the sketch. The works in Peaks & Valleys remind us of the effectiveness and accessibility of drawing – its ability to give us a stronger sense of the character of people and places in the physical and virtual worlds, its function as a visualization of someone’s thought process, and its usefulness in our attempts to connect with the past and the present to open up new potentials for the future. In a binge-watch economy, movies and documentaries are stretched out to 10 streamable episodes. The artists in Peaks & Valleys tell good stories in one image.
Curated by Anthony Record
Nothing But Flowers
Curated by Eleanor Eichenbaum
December 11, 2021 – January 3, 2022
The past few years have found us outside again and again. Foiled against pandemic conditions; this venturing outward brought newfound appreciation and relief. Outside we looked away from computer screens. Outside we bent closer to grass and tilted our gazes to the sky. We felt the changing weather and also noticed the change within us. With the seasons, flowers bloomed on their own timeline. This exhibition celebrates yesterday's flowers and today's blooms, it offers a garden of sorts; a place where we grow and anticipate whatever comes next.
Artists: Angela Deane, Bix Archer, Christina Rohan, K Kovacs, Walter Matthews
Curated by Eleanor Eichenbaum
December 11, 2021 – January 3, 2022
The past few years have found us outside again and again. Foiled against pandemic conditions; this venturing outward brought newfound appreciation and relief. Outside we looked away from computer screens. Outside we bent closer to grass and tilted our gazes to the sky. We felt the changing weather and also noticed the change within us. With the seasons, flowers bloomed on their own timeline. This exhibition celebrates yesterday's flowers and today's blooms, it offers a garden of sorts; a place where we grow and anticipate whatever comes next.
Artists: Angela Deane, Bix Archer, Christina Rohan, K Kovacs, Walter Matthews
Blood Moon
Neil Bender, Eleanor Eichenbaum, Anthony Record, Emiliano Settecasi
October 16 – October 30, 2021
QUAID Gallery
A blood moon is a lunar eclipse where the moon takes on a red cast due to tiny particles in our atmosphere. This scatters light from the sun, which then gets reflected back to us from the moon as the color of blood.
In the Old Testament book of Joel there is a prophecy about a sequence of blood moons. This series, coinciding with religious holidays, signals the beginning of the apocalypse. Usually associated with the end of the world, apocalypse actually means revelation, something uncovered. It comes from the Greek word which literally means to pull the lid off something - a truth about the world is unhidden and we see things anew. Apocalypse is not the end of the world, but the end of the world as we know it.
The works in Blood Moon have been brought together under the apocalyptic dysfunction of our political economy, media bubbles, and the biosphere, and as a reflection upon the roles that art can play in the project of bringing about the life of the world to come. How can we lead audiences and ourselves away from the false standards used to subjugate us? How can we imagine beyond the end of the world as we know it? What is the final destiny of our souls?
Happy Halloween.
Neil Bender, Eleanor Eichenbaum, Anthony Record, Emiliano Settecasi
October 16 – October 30, 2021
QUAID Gallery
A blood moon is a lunar eclipse where the moon takes on a red cast due to tiny particles in our atmosphere. This scatters light from the sun, which then gets reflected back to us from the moon as the color of blood.
In the Old Testament book of Joel there is a prophecy about a sequence of blood moons. This series, coinciding with religious holidays, signals the beginning of the apocalypse. Usually associated with the end of the world, apocalypse actually means revelation, something uncovered. It comes from the Greek word which literally means to pull the lid off something - a truth about the world is unhidden and we see things anew. Apocalypse is not the end of the world, but the end of the world as we know it.
The works in Blood Moon have been brought together under the apocalyptic dysfunction of our political economy, media bubbles, and the biosphere, and as a reflection upon the roles that art can play in the project of bringing about the life of the world to come. How can we lead audiences and ourselves away from the false standards used to subjugate us? How can we imagine beyond the end of the world as we know it? What is the final destiny of our souls?
Happy Halloween.
disappointing son of rich ppl
Kevin Brophy
QUAID Gallery
September 17 – October 1, 2021
disappointing son of rich ppl is a fiber-rich, language-based multimedia exhibition curated by Sam Newton for QUAID Gallery. The show includes the titled in-progress, research-based new media document accompanied by two new Absence Monuments—sculptural light installations—that counter it by exploiting what is missing in a cultural hegemony and aggrandizing what great lack we could enjoy in a world without that dead-fixed horror of patriarchy-meets-capital. With this project, Brophy appropriates the conceptual body of the prototypical failson to make a few cheap jokes at his expense. She treats the subject as she does everything else in this world-life: with humor, self-implicating criticality, and the melodrama of *we*, an embodiment of poetic rage and equitable care.
Kevin Brophy @thekevbro is a US-based visual artist, writer, and sometimes educator interested in dialogical power structures—textual, visual, and social—with a focus on everyday language and non-dominant narratives. Broadly, her artistic practice includes poetry, new media, installation, and speculative design facilitated and informed by social technologies. She holds a BA from the University of South Florida (2012) and an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University (2017) as a Regina and Marlin Miller fellow. She has participated in residencies and exhibitions internationally, in established and alternative spaces, both online and off. Most recently, she has been awarded an NEA Southern Constellation Fellowship, Media Arts Fellowship at the Kala Art Institute, and held Artist-in-Residence positions at the University of Kansas and Penn State University. Her collaborative video game hot*girls*only* is currently playable at Arsenal Contemporary online.
Kevin Brophy
QUAID Gallery
September 17 – October 1, 2021
disappointing son of rich ppl is a fiber-rich, language-based multimedia exhibition curated by Sam Newton for QUAID Gallery. The show includes the titled in-progress, research-based new media document accompanied by two new Absence Monuments—sculptural light installations—that counter it by exploiting what is missing in a cultural hegemony and aggrandizing what great lack we could enjoy in a world without that dead-fixed horror of patriarchy-meets-capital. With this project, Brophy appropriates the conceptual body of the prototypical failson to make a few cheap jokes at his expense. She treats the subject as she does everything else in this world-life: with humor, self-implicating criticality, and the melodrama of *we*, an embodiment of poetic rage and equitable care.
Kevin Brophy @thekevbro is a US-based visual artist, writer, and sometimes educator interested in dialogical power structures—textual, visual, and social—with a focus on everyday language and non-dominant narratives. Broadly, her artistic practice includes poetry, new media, installation, and speculative design facilitated and informed by social technologies. She holds a BA from the University of South Florida (2012) and an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University (2017) as a Regina and Marlin Miller fellow. She has participated in residencies and exhibitions internationally, in established and alternative spaces, both online and off. Most recently, she has been awarded an NEA Southern Constellation Fellowship, Media Arts Fellowship at the Kala Art Institute, and held Artist-in-Residence positions at the University of Kansas and Penn State University. Her collaborative video game hot*girls*only* is currently playable at Arsenal Contemporary online.
Reconcile
Dalila Sanabria
QUAID Gallery
July 3 – 31, 2021
"Reconcile" is a solo show featuring new work by QUAID Artist-in-Residence Dalila Sanabria exploring themes of preservation, permanence, and the illusion of stability. Created and installed in the context of QUAID Gallery’s renovated garage space, this body of work directly references and subverts the central Florida garage that once stored the cardboard boxes containing her family’s belongings. For ten years, her parents waited a period of penalty following their deportation from the United States in 2009, with their exile narrative originating from the Port of Tampa. Using both the literal remains of her family’s boxes, recycled carpet squares, salt, flour, coffee, and found furniture, "Reconcile" attempts to recall and disrupt the familiarity of the domestic space, culminating a decade of familial estrangement and the artist’s former homes spent between Florida, Chile and Colombia.
Dalila Sanabria is an interdisciplinary artist from central Florida. She received a BFA in Art from Brigham Young University and is a prospective MFA Sculpture candidate at Cranbrook Academy of Art. She works primarily with sculpture, installation, and lens-based media. As a child of immigrants, Sanabria shares dual nationality with Colombia and Chile. For Sanabria, materiality is as significant as her cross-cultural Latine identity, and she often utilizes construction and craft materials for exploring notions of displacement and permanence. Sanabria has exhibited nationally and internationally, with recent exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans and the Rio Gallery in Salt Lake City, UT. She has also received numerous awards and grants that have allowed her to perform projects in locations such as Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Germany, and South Korea.
Dalila Sanabria
QUAID Gallery
July 3 – 31, 2021
"Reconcile" is a solo show featuring new work by QUAID Artist-in-Residence Dalila Sanabria exploring themes of preservation, permanence, and the illusion of stability. Created and installed in the context of QUAID Gallery’s renovated garage space, this body of work directly references and subverts the central Florida garage that once stored the cardboard boxes containing her family’s belongings. For ten years, her parents waited a period of penalty following their deportation from the United States in 2009, with their exile narrative originating from the Port of Tampa. Using both the literal remains of her family’s boxes, recycled carpet squares, salt, flour, coffee, and found furniture, "Reconcile" attempts to recall and disrupt the familiarity of the domestic space, culminating a decade of familial estrangement and the artist’s former homes spent between Florida, Chile and Colombia.
Dalila Sanabria is an interdisciplinary artist from central Florida. She received a BFA in Art from Brigham Young University and is a prospective MFA Sculpture candidate at Cranbrook Academy of Art. She works primarily with sculpture, installation, and lens-based media. As a child of immigrants, Sanabria shares dual nationality with Colombia and Chile. For Sanabria, materiality is as significant as her cross-cultural Latine identity, and she often utilizes construction and craft materials for exploring notions of displacement and permanence. Sanabria has exhibited nationally and internationally, with recent exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans and the Rio Gallery in Salt Lake City, UT. She has also received numerous awards and grants that have allowed her to perform projects in locations such as Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Germany, and South Korea.
SMILING INTO
Peter Cotroneo & Khai Grubbs
QUAID Gallery
May 8 – May 29, 2021
The works in Smiling Into were finished during the Spring 2021 QUAID Artist Residency. Peter Cotroneo and Khai Grubbs were selected from a pool of applicants to be the first-ever QUAID artists-in-residence, and they used the QUAID exhibition space as a shared studio for the month of April.
Peter Cotroneo:
Smiling into the sidewalk, heel-toeing the pavement- on dog walks, commuting to work from parking lots. Blocking out the sun and avoiding collisions with cars and golf carts. Grinding it to dust and scraping it away. Cat shit on the out sole. Hole in my sock. Serious jokes.
My paintings are gestures and wiggles, dust clouds and dirty water stains. I try to make them laugh. I try to make them cry. I try to make them sweat.
Khai Grubbs:
Through my work, I explore themes related to black identity, queerness, the body, notions of equity, and space and form. My paintings and installations are designed to garner the viewer’s attention and encourage contemplation and movement.
I studied architecture at Howard University, and my commercial experience heavily influences the strong composition of my work. I express my view of the current environment and climate of our time by drawing inspiration from figure-ground studies, street art, typography, poetry, and graphics.
Color also plays an important role in both my paintings and yarn installations. Bursting with energy and bold colors, the collaborative yarn sculptures I create often activate underutilized or abandoned spaces, and are an ephemeral homage to the vibrancy of life. In contrast, my two-dimensional work is characterized by the use of black and white, compelling compositions, and aims to draw the attention of the viewer to what is omitted.
Peter Cotroneo & Khai Grubbs
QUAID Gallery
May 8 – May 29, 2021
The works in Smiling Into were finished during the Spring 2021 QUAID Artist Residency. Peter Cotroneo and Khai Grubbs were selected from a pool of applicants to be the first-ever QUAID artists-in-residence, and they used the QUAID exhibition space as a shared studio for the month of April.
Peter Cotroneo:
Smiling into the sidewalk, heel-toeing the pavement- on dog walks, commuting to work from parking lots. Blocking out the sun and avoiding collisions with cars and golf carts. Grinding it to dust and scraping it away. Cat shit on the out sole. Hole in my sock. Serious jokes.
My paintings are gestures and wiggles, dust clouds and dirty water stains. I try to make them laugh. I try to make them cry. I try to make them sweat.
Khai Grubbs:
Through my work, I explore themes related to black identity, queerness, the body, notions of equity, and space and form. My paintings and installations are designed to garner the viewer’s attention and encourage contemplation and movement.
I studied architecture at Howard University, and my commercial experience heavily influences the strong composition of my work. I express my view of the current environment and climate of our time by drawing inspiration from figure-ground studies, street art, typography, poetry, and graphics.
Color also plays an important role in both my paintings and yarn installations. Bursting with energy and bold colors, the collaborative yarn sculptures I create often activate underutilized or abandoned spaces, and are an ephemeral homage to the vibrancy of life. In contrast, my two-dimensional work is characterized by the use of black and white, compelling compositions, and aims to draw the attention of the viewer to what is omitted.
Outdoor Musical Performance and Closing Reception for "Juice Choir" at QUAID Gallery
You're invited to fall asleep and dream with us! For the closing of "Juice Choir," Jessi (sleepy) and Eric (the moon) will be playing new songs from their musical project Gooder that will bring you through a series of dreamscapes (and a couple nightmares). Since dreams can be non-linear and non-physical, each attendee will receive a tiny booklet to help guide them through the dreams. We might need your help through! Click here to get your free ticket. Tickets are free but required to limit capacity.
Luckily, QUAID is secluded, with a very large outdoor courtyard for socially-distanced gathering, and the building has two large garage doors that can be opened on the east and south walls of the gallery. To keep everyone healthy and comfortable, the following guidelines will be in place for all events at the gallery:
+ The inside of the gallery is limited to 4 people at a time. Chairs and ground markers spaced 6 ft. apart are in the surrounding outdoor courtyard for the audience to gather.
+ The garage doors on the east and south sides of the building will remain open.
+ Face masks and 6 ft. social distancing required at all times inside and outside.
+ This event is BYOB. Straws will be provided for guests to sip with a mask on.
+ Obviously, if you don't feel well, please stay home
Luckily, QUAID is secluded, with a very large outdoor courtyard for socially-distanced gathering, and the building has two large garage doors that can be opened on the east and south walls of the gallery. To keep everyone healthy and comfortable, the following guidelines will be in place for all events at the gallery:
+ The inside of the gallery is limited to 4 people at a time. Chairs and ground markers spaced 6 ft. apart are in the surrounding outdoor courtyard for the audience to gather.
+ The garage doors on the east and south sides of the building will remain open.
+ Face masks and 6 ft. social distancing required at all times inside and outside.
+ This event is BYOB. Straws will be provided for guests to sip with a mask on.
+ Obviously, if you don't feel well, please stay home
You are invited to an opening reception for "Juice Choir," a solo exhibition of new work from Jessi Sherbet at QUAID Gallery.
Saturday, February 27. 7-10p
Jessi Sherbet , A.K.A Jeffie Sherbet, is a Floridian artist who makes digital collages, linocuts, drawings, paintings, and clothing. They’ve been making art and music since their early teens and formerly worked in illustration design.
“I strive to make things that embrace the dollar store and the river, and am motivated by catharsis, convenience, peace, and play. I’m interested in the ebb and flow of both excess and presence within me and around me, often utilizing accessible and convenient tools to express colors, distortions, characters, shapes and texture. My art often echoes memory mutations IRL and URL, musical-gender fluidity, the dandruff of dreams n’ memes, and the tragic vision of oceans filled with clown and pig figurines.”
Saturday, February 27. 7-10p
Jessi Sherbet , A.K.A Jeffie Sherbet, is a Floridian artist who makes digital collages, linocuts, drawings, paintings, and clothing. They’ve been making art and music since their early teens and formerly worked in illustration design.
“I strive to make things that embrace the dollar store and the river, and am motivated by catharsis, convenience, peace, and play. I’m interested in the ebb and flow of both excess and presence within me and around me, often utilizing accessible and convenient tools to express colors, distortions, characters, shapes and texture. My art often echoes memory mutations IRL and URL, musical-gender fluidity, the dandruff of dreams n’ memes, and the tragic vision of oceans filled with clown and pig figurines.”
Fidget Splinter is a show of recent work from three generations of abstract painters from the Tampa Bay area: Rhonda Donovan, Erica Greear, and Anthony Record.
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/fidget-splinter-tickets-131767144075
Whether it’s the assembled and stained paintings of Donovan, the scratchy enmeshed digital collages of Greear, or the shadowy inscrutable paintings of Record, the artists in Fidget Splinter exercise a disciplined imagination and a restless spirit to create genre-defying works that are spontaneous and dense.
With a structural whimsy and a formal rigor that is challenging to enter and a joy to get lost in, the works in Fidget Splinter shimmer with a jittery ferment that rewards searching eyes.
Rhonda Donovan:
“My artworks map memories of human interaction, manifested by cut, torn, unraveled, painted, and sewn materials, assembled as metaphors of the many possible outcomes from damaged or mended associations. The abstracted layers encapsulate pain, scars, healing, and the joyous moments of life. Surfaces are well stocked with layers of color or texture to mimic these complexities, scars from surfaces that have fallen apart and been rejoined to gesture the story of our existence, and materials assembled over time which index relationships rejoined in forward momentum. Hope is that advancing movement. It is the last thing to go, but it is also what forces us to stay the course, make an effort, and search for the possibility of repair.”
After a career of making art for advertising and publishing, Rhonda Massel Donovan returned to fine art studies. Since completing her MFA last spring during the onset of the COVID pandemic, she has been working from her home studio while also as art faculty for USF. Since making this career shift, she has been recognized with exhibitions, invitations, and awards in Florida, New York, Hawaii, and Europe.
Erica Greear:
“Subconscious renditions & anxious tendencies are condensed with the intent to be digested into interpretative purity. My process is rapid and highly intuitive as a means of limiting anxiety induced perfectionism, and to trick myself into a sense of control. It is my poetic attempt to supply clarity and invite the subliminal to guide me through play - to hone the anxiety occupying my life into spatially aware submission, taming it into a fluid and palpable visual manifestation. The nature of this work is to rein in, encapsulate, and examine the psychological themes of being plagued by emotional exhaustion, overactive thoughts, and rumination - to create a sense of balance amongst the chaos. The redirection of thought and energy inspires a central rebirth through cathartic practices.”
Erica Greear is an interdisciplinary artist who paints, works digitally, and dabbles in ceramics and textiles. She graduated from The Lois Cowles Harrison Center for the Visual and Performing Arts, and she works as a floral designer & vintage seller, taking inspiration from botanicals, items from the past, street fashion, Co-Star & the exhausted human spirit.
Anthony Record:
“I strive to make things that are organically hyper-ambiguous and inscrutable. My painting is an art of interruption that reflects the searching and restless qualities of contemporary consciousness as it has evolved online, and is influenced formally by the primordial forms suggested by the kudzu-covered trees that line Florida’s highways most of the year. Those ambiguous shadowy forms, reminiscent of the birth of galaxies and the end of civilization, suggest to me simultaneously scenes from the distant past and the distant future. My paintings share many formal qualities with this kind of messy organic growth as a way of engaging with the sublime dread of deep time, and as an expression of how the haunted history of the landscape echoes out into our everyday lives.”
Anthony Record is an artist and educator, and he has been the Studio Programs Coordinator at the Tampa Museum of Art since 2018. From 2009-2018 he was a professor of art and art history, and his art has been exhibited internationally at galleries and museums in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Kanazawa, Vancouver, and elsewhere. He is the co-founder and co-director of the artist cooperative gallery QUAID, located in the Seminole Heights neighborhood of Tampa, FL since 2014.
****************************************************************************
Luckily, QUAID is secluded, with a very large outdoor courtyard for socially-distanced gathering, and the building has two large garage doors that can be opened on the east and south walls of the gallery. To keep everyone healthy and comfortable, the following guidelines will be in place for all events at the gallery:
+ The inside of the gallery is limited to 4 people at a time. Markers spaced 6 ft. apart are sprayed in the surrounding outdoor courtyard.
+ The garage doors on the east and south sides of the building will remain open.
+ Face masks and 6 ft. social distancing required at all times inside and outside.
+ This event is BYOB. Straws will be provided for guests to sip with a mask on.
+ Obviously, if you don't feel well, please stay home
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/fidget-splinter-tickets-131767144075
Whether it’s the assembled and stained paintings of Donovan, the scratchy enmeshed digital collages of Greear, or the shadowy inscrutable paintings of Record, the artists in Fidget Splinter exercise a disciplined imagination and a restless spirit to create genre-defying works that are spontaneous and dense.
With a structural whimsy and a formal rigor that is challenging to enter and a joy to get lost in, the works in Fidget Splinter shimmer with a jittery ferment that rewards searching eyes.
Rhonda Donovan:
“My artworks map memories of human interaction, manifested by cut, torn, unraveled, painted, and sewn materials, assembled as metaphors of the many possible outcomes from damaged or mended associations. The abstracted layers encapsulate pain, scars, healing, and the joyous moments of life. Surfaces are well stocked with layers of color or texture to mimic these complexities, scars from surfaces that have fallen apart and been rejoined to gesture the story of our existence, and materials assembled over time which index relationships rejoined in forward momentum. Hope is that advancing movement. It is the last thing to go, but it is also what forces us to stay the course, make an effort, and search for the possibility of repair.”
After a career of making art for advertising and publishing, Rhonda Massel Donovan returned to fine art studies. Since completing her MFA last spring during the onset of the COVID pandemic, she has been working from her home studio while also as art faculty for USF. Since making this career shift, she has been recognized with exhibitions, invitations, and awards in Florida, New York, Hawaii, and Europe.
Erica Greear:
“Subconscious renditions & anxious tendencies are condensed with the intent to be digested into interpretative purity. My process is rapid and highly intuitive as a means of limiting anxiety induced perfectionism, and to trick myself into a sense of control. It is my poetic attempt to supply clarity and invite the subliminal to guide me through play - to hone the anxiety occupying my life into spatially aware submission, taming it into a fluid and palpable visual manifestation. The nature of this work is to rein in, encapsulate, and examine the psychological themes of being plagued by emotional exhaustion, overactive thoughts, and rumination - to create a sense of balance amongst the chaos. The redirection of thought and energy inspires a central rebirth through cathartic practices.”
Erica Greear is an interdisciplinary artist who paints, works digitally, and dabbles in ceramics and textiles. She graduated from The Lois Cowles Harrison Center for the Visual and Performing Arts, and she works as a floral designer & vintage seller, taking inspiration from botanicals, items from the past, street fashion, Co-Star & the exhausted human spirit.
Anthony Record:
“I strive to make things that are organically hyper-ambiguous and inscrutable. My painting is an art of interruption that reflects the searching and restless qualities of contemporary consciousness as it has evolved online, and is influenced formally by the primordial forms suggested by the kudzu-covered trees that line Florida’s highways most of the year. Those ambiguous shadowy forms, reminiscent of the birth of galaxies and the end of civilization, suggest to me simultaneously scenes from the distant past and the distant future. My paintings share many formal qualities with this kind of messy organic growth as a way of engaging with the sublime dread of deep time, and as an expression of how the haunted history of the landscape echoes out into our everyday lives.”
Anthony Record is an artist and educator, and he has been the Studio Programs Coordinator at the Tampa Museum of Art since 2018. From 2009-2018 he was a professor of art and art history, and his art has been exhibited internationally at galleries and museums in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Kanazawa, Vancouver, and elsewhere. He is the co-founder and co-director of the artist cooperative gallery QUAID, located in the Seminole Heights neighborhood of Tampa, FL since 2014.
****************************************************************************
Luckily, QUAID is secluded, with a very large outdoor courtyard for socially-distanced gathering, and the building has two large garage doors that can be opened on the east and south walls of the gallery. To keep everyone healthy and comfortable, the following guidelines will be in place for all events at the gallery:
+ The inside of the gallery is limited to 4 people at a time. Markers spaced 6 ft. apart are sprayed in the surrounding outdoor courtyard.
+ The garage doors on the east and south sides of the building will remain open.
+ Face masks and 6 ft. social distancing required at all times inside and outside.
+ This event is BYOB. Straws will be provided for guests to sip with a mask on.
+ Obviously, if you don't feel well, please stay home
QUAID Gallery Presents Sled Dogs
QUAID is back IRL on October 3 with a group exhibition of recent work by the artists who run and fund one of the best artist-run exhibition spaces in the southeast. Sled Dogs features works by Neil Bender, Warren Cockerham, Taylor Finke, Jenn Miller, Justin Nelson, Sam Newton, Anthony Record, Gary Schmitt, and Emiliano Settecasi.
October 3 also marks the launch of the QUAID Patreon, where you can support QUAID Gallery for as little as $5 a month, with 4 levels of rewards, including entry into our monthly art lottery. QUAID t-shirts and koozies are on-site for immediate pickup for those who subscribe to our Patreon at the reception, and our first QUAID Lottery drawing will take place at the gallery on October 17.
Get your free ticket (required for admission) here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/119929860441
Luckily, our space is secluded, with a very large outdoor courtyard for socially-distanced gathering, and the building has two large garage doors that can be opened on the east and south walls of the gallery. To keep everyone healthy and comfortable, the following guidelines will be in place for all events at the gallery:
+ CAPACITY IS LIMITED. PLEASE MAKE SURE TO REGISTER AT EVENTBRITE FOR A FREE BUT REQUIRED TICKET.
+ The inside of the gallery is limited to 4 people at a time. Markers spaced 6 ft. apart will be placed in the surrounding outdoor courtyard.
+ The garage doors on the east and south sides of the building will remain open.
+ Face masks and 6 ft. social distancing required at all times inside and outside.
+ This event is BYOB. Straws will be provided for guests to sip with a mask on.
+ Obviously, if you don't feel well, please stay home.
QUAID is back IRL on October 3 with a group exhibition of recent work by the artists who run and fund one of the best artist-run exhibition spaces in the southeast. Sled Dogs features works by Neil Bender, Warren Cockerham, Taylor Finke, Jenn Miller, Justin Nelson, Sam Newton, Anthony Record, Gary Schmitt, and Emiliano Settecasi.
October 3 also marks the launch of the QUAID Patreon, where you can support QUAID Gallery for as little as $5 a month, with 4 levels of rewards, including entry into our monthly art lottery. QUAID t-shirts and koozies are on-site for immediate pickup for those who subscribe to our Patreon at the reception, and our first QUAID Lottery drawing will take place at the gallery on October 17.
Get your free ticket (required for admission) here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/119929860441
Luckily, our space is secluded, with a very large outdoor courtyard for socially-distanced gathering, and the building has two large garage doors that can be opened on the east and south walls of the gallery. To keep everyone healthy and comfortable, the following guidelines will be in place for all events at the gallery:
+ CAPACITY IS LIMITED. PLEASE MAKE SURE TO REGISTER AT EVENTBRITE FOR A FREE BUT REQUIRED TICKET.
+ The inside of the gallery is limited to 4 people at a time. Markers spaced 6 ft. apart will be placed in the surrounding outdoor courtyard.
+ The garage doors on the east and south sides of the building will remain open.
+ Face masks and 6 ft. social distancing required at all times inside and outside.
+ This event is BYOB. Straws will be provided for guests to sip with a mask on.
+ Obviously, if you don't feel well, please stay home.
QUAID GALLERY
1624 E 7th Ave., Suite 241
Tampa, FL 33605
quaidgallerycontact@gmail.com
1624 E 7th Ave., Suite 241
Tampa, FL 33605
quaidgallerycontact@gmail.com