In a landscape of uniformly slinky dresses and metrosexual getups, Jeff Whipple stands out in a black t-shirt and a ball cap.

To go with his laid-back attire, the Tampa artist sports a laid-back ‘tude—even as a party thrown in his honor thrusts him into the spotlight. At South Seas Hotel, one in a row of boutique hotels on Collins Avenue brimming with Basel-related action, his multimedia installation—a triptych of simultaneous video projections—serves as an eye-catching animated beacon.

Walking into the hotel, I find Whipple on his way outside to make sure everything is working the way it should be. Gazing up at three screens mounted at the hotel’s front—one on top of the entrance overhang, the other two strapped tightly between palm trees—we wait for the piece to loop and begin again. When it does, all three videos seem to be in sync. Words and shapes fly smoothly from one screen onto the next, and the soundtrack blasts music and dialog at the right times.

“I’m just glad it works,” says Whipple, who’s been in town for nearly a week installing the piece and tweaking the details. He began work on it in July, when the Tampa Museum of Art approached him about doing a one-person exhibition during Miami Basel.

“It’s like being asked to go to the Olympics for the museum,” he says.

If Miami Basel is the Olympics of art, Whipple is the equivalent of a decathlete. He makes videos, paintings, digital photographs, and large-scale installations, writes plays and directs actors, all with great skill. This latest work, The Spasm Between the Infinities, revolves around an iconic shape that’s appeared in Whipple’s work since 1983: a wiggly triple quotation mark—the spasm—that represents the transformation of nothing into something. Meaning is born when the three lines register in the viewer’s mind as a pattern, Whipple says; one would be random, two a coincidence, but three—that’s something.

In the videos, three Bay area performers (one is poet Venus Jones) act out soliloquies on the brevity and harsh disappointments of life as a spasm of meaning. As they speak, patches in the shape of spasms cover their eyes and graphics pulse in the background. A naked man and woman covered with paper spasms dance awkwardly by themselves, and then a spasm made of wax is lit like a candle and slowly melts away. The whole presentation is nothing if not wacky, the scale and craft of its execution nothing if not impressive.

“He essentially is a prodigy,” says Tampa Museum of Art interim director Ken Rollins, who has followed Whipple’s career for nearly twenty years. While he was director at Largo’s Gulf Coast Museum of Art, he staged an expansive exhibit of the artist’s work. When Rollins decided the museum should have a presence at this year’s fair, he went to Whipple.

“This is probably the major art scene in America right now. For a museum to take on a fairly ambitious project in the face of some of the most important art in the world, I think, demonstrates something about the character of that institution…and confidence in artists in our state,” Rollins says.

“[Whipple’s] not just about making a pretty picture—he’s about exploring ideas, and often times exploring philosophical questions and relationships…and the values we ascribe in our limited time here on earth.”

The big question for the museum is whether the event will pay off as a marketing investment by planting its name—and Tampa’s—in the minds of thousands of serious art aficionados this weekend. The TMA is—as several people commented to me over the course of the evening—possibly the only museum from outside of Miami to stage an event at the fair. (Paris’s Pompidou Center may be another.) Most exhibitors are small private galleries.

The city of Tampa co-sponsored the exhibit through Arte 2007, the biennial festival that celebrates Latin American art at venues throughout Tampa, including the art museum. Their goal is to lure visitors to that event, which takes place next November. Paul Wilborn, the city’s creative industries manager, brought representatives from Tampa’s convention center to see the effect Basel has had on Miami Beach.

“This has made a huge difference in Miami…This is an art project that has caused incredible investment,” he says. “Florida is really evolving into a very cool state for art. It’s taken a while—in Tampa it’s taken a while…but things are happening so fast now.”

Christine Burdick, president of Tampa’s Downtown Partnership, speaks from experience when she echoes those sentiments. Before tackling our smaller burg, Burdick worked on the revitalization of Lincoln Road in Miami Beach, mere blocks from where we’re all standing, sipping bubbly Italian wine provided by one of the exhibit’s sponsors.

A decade ago, you could shoot a canon down Lincoln Road and not hit anybody, she says. Cultural use development was the primary force behind the area’s revitalization with retailers, restaurants, and condos, she says. In downtown Tampa, she hopes to repeat that success by bringing cultural businesses to Franklin Street in particular.

“It’s ours to grab,” she says of culture-linked economic success.

Mark Ormond, a Sarasota-based critic and curator who selected the pieces that appeared in the Gulf Coast Whipple exhibit, feels less compelled to cheerlead for Tampa, but even he thinks it’s not unrealistic to plant the idea of the Bay area as a secondary destination to Basel.

“I think people who start coming here, hopefully they’ll extend their trip to two weeks and maybe go somewhere else in the state and see what else is happening,” he says.

“I think Jeff was a wise choice. I have never seen him not rise to the challenge.”

Pictured: (1) Jeff Whipple's installation at South Seas Hotel, (2) Jeff Whipple (center) with girlfriend Chalet Zell and Paul Wilborn, creative industries manager for the city of Tampa, (3) O, spasm candle burning bright - a still from Whipple's video.