Vero Beach’s art scene is weighted toward the traditional. Not to say that our art galleries and artists’ studios don’t have their outside-the-box moments, but the seeker of the new, the unusual, and the unexpected may want to visit Melbourne soon for aesthetic adventure.
That’s where the Florida Institute of Technology galleries – the Foosaner Art Museum and the Ruth Funk Center for Textile Arts – are currently showing leading-edge installation art plus the work of an Cuban artist whose oeuvre is decidedly non-Western.
Located in the Eau Gallie Arts District, the Foosaner’s cumbersomely titled show, “Caminos Transitados/Paths Taken: A Retrospective of Francisco ‘Gordillo’ Arredondo Baba Oñi” is that artist’s first retrospective anywhere.
Known simply as “Gordillo,” the artist is represented by 60 paintings and drawings inspired by the Afro-Caribbean religion of Santeria.
“I haven’t put so much passion and energy into a show in a while,” says Carla Funk, director of both museums.
It took drive, patience and perseverance on Funk’s part to get this show on the road. After meeting Gordillo on a cultural tour to Cuba a couple years ago, she returned to Havana last December to personally ferry Gordillo’s works to the U.S. She even negotiated extensive red tape to bring the artist to Melbourne for a brief residency (he has since returned to Cuba).
Gordillo was born in Havana in 1964, but traces his family’s lineage to the Congo in Equatorial Africa. He was trained in at Havana’s Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes, known as San Alejandro for the convent where it was established. Since receiving his diploma in 1988, Gordillo has exhibited in scores of shows in Cuba, Demark, England, Canada and the U.S.
In 2004 and again in 2015 his paintings were awarded first prize in competitions honoring the legacy of Cuba’s Wilfredo Lam, a painter whose long shadow has touched every Cuban artist to come after him. In the current exhibition Gordillo pays tribute to Lam in a huge charcoal portrait head of the maestro, surrounded by the surreal creatures of Lam’s imagination.
While Gordillo was educated in the European-based tradition of the academy, his work remains true to his Afro-Cuban identity. Gordillo synthesizes the symbols and stories of Africa’s Bantu-speaking cultures with the New World religion of Santeria, itself steeped in the mythology of Africa’s Yoruba people.
Enslaved Africans developed Santeria to secretly worship their ancestors’ gods in the guise of their captors’ Christian saints. The religion is still practiced today.
In fact, “Baba Oñi” (“Father Honey”) in the title of the current exhibition refers to Gordillo’s status as a priest of Santeria. The honorific suggests that the artist is especially devoted to the goddess of sweetness and love, Ochún.
She as well as other deities called Orichás are depicted in the artworks as abstracted figures or symbols. They are also identified by their attributes and associative colors.
“I tried to create a chronological installation where you can see Gordillo’s development as an artist,” says Funk.
Beginning in 1989, the earliest works in the show are less representational. Their religious significance is discreet and the titles are cryptic. Through the years the artist has come to address Santeria more openly, with figures and titles that invoke the Orishas’ names. The most recent works are mystical “portraits” of the gods.
You don’t have to be a Santeria savant to appreciate Gordillo’s artistry, however. His intriguing works in mixed media on paper, cardboard and canvas vibrate with color, pattern and texture – a language that is understood by art lovers everywhere.
Those palpable aesthetic qualities are also rife in the exhibition at the Funk Center on the Florida Tech campus. “Reimagined: Innovations in Fiber” presents works by Miami-based artists Alex Trimino and Carrie Sieh that don’t fit into a gilded frame. Indeed, this is art that sprawls across the gallery walls and creeps along its floor.
Born in Colombia, Trimino earned her M.F.A. in 2012 from Florida Atlantic University; Sieh received a B.A. in art from the University of California in Santa Cruz in 2001, and went on to earn an M.A. in library and information science from San Jose State University in 2008.
The exhibition brought the artists together as a result of their independent inquiries for a show at the Funk Center.
Logistically speaking, showing the bold, space-loving works of the two-in-one gallery could have resulted in a competition for the viewer’s attention. That was prevented by Assistant Director Keidra Navaroli’s expert installation. The layout of the exhibition is a delight to the eye, flowing seamlessly from one artwork to the next in the Funk’s large, L-shaped gallery.
“Reimagined” pushes the boundaries of what can be considered textile art. Both artists use traditional textile hand-working techniques in unexpected ways. Trimino produces eccentric objects that combine handicraft with mid-20th century technology.
Sieh’s creations illustrate, in her words, “the persistent connections between masculinity, technology, and labor.”
More than 20 feet long, Sieh’s “Content Creators and Luxuriated Objects” (2013) pairs the silhouette of an industrial revolution-era spinning machine (crocheted in sparkling black VHS tape) with a hand-painted figure of Freddie Mercury, the Zanzibar-born lead vocalist of the rock band Queen. Man and machine are connected by a line of VHS tape that travels from spinning mule to the mic in Freddie’s hand.
Why Freddie Mercury? According to Navaroli, the artist used the front man’s image as a symbol of virility. Past installations of the piece have included depictions of The Incredible Hulk and Chuck Norris, for the same purpose.
Gender roles and technology are explored in other Sieh works, including an embroidered and painted pieced fabric work that depicts the dull gold silhouette of a doomed battleship in “A Neurasthenic, a Playboy, and a Weekend Warrior Walk into a Bar, Remembering the Maine” (2014). Another work in the show depicts a male chastity device (i.e., a BDSM sex toy) painted in silhouette over 49 wax-dipped, crocheted granny squares. That one is called “A New Order of Invalids” (2014).
Compared to Sieh, Alex Trimino’s work is lighter in form as well as spirit. Her installation “Totemic Patterns of Light” (2016) is comprised of colorful illuminated neon and fluorescent tubes that spring like gaudy trees from the floor of the otherwise unlit gallery. The luminous limbs of these objects are partially clothed in crocheted and knitted sleeves, wrapped with multicolored fabric, circumvented with peek-a-boo lace. An overhead projector at the edge of the gallery sends an additional pattern of colored light across the floor and up the wall opposite it, adding to the slightly disorienting effect of the environment.
If contemporary art is meant to stir opinion and stimulate discussion, the current exhibitions at the Foosaner and Funk are best seen with friends. The drive back to Vero will be anything but dull.
“Caminos Transitos/Paths Taken” can be seen at the Foosaner Art Museum through March 13; “Reimagined: Innovations in Fiber” runs through May 7 at the Funk Center for Textile Arts.
