Creative Loafing’s most avid readers probably already know we’re fans of Creatives Exchange. The women’s art collective includes some of the best artists in the Tampa Bay area. Every year, you can see their new work at HCC Ybor for free. And this year, they’ve adopted a theme for added inspiration.
“Most of us in the collective had resisted the idea of a theme show. Our titles were always very general,” says photographer Suzanne Williamson, “but having shown together for several years we began to see that a theme might push each of us to create work that went a bit beyond.”
The group came up with the theme together. At first, they proposed “split personalities.” Then Jenny Carey brought out a thesaurus to expand their options. “We narrowed it down to Fractured Spaces,” says Carey. “Once we had it, it definitely informed a lot of the work. Some really wrestled with it, all of us I think. Personally, I think it is our best group show though.”
Fractured Spaces is a theme with many possible interpretations, which is part of what makes the show interesting.
To fully understand the work in this show, one must consider what the word fractured means — broken, cracked, divided, split. Our lives often feel as though they’re divided into sections — childhood, school, college, career, marriage, kids, health, sickness, retirement. On an even smaller scale, one could say that our lives are simply a series of moments.
Eileen Goldenberg’s “Ask Me Anything!” is a nod to her childhood obsession with mysticism and fortune-telling. It reminds me of the Zoltar machine in the movie Big. Up top there is a picture of a fortune teller shuffling cards. Below, a spinner, like those that come with a board game. And at the very bottom, a small box.
Goldenberg’s “Zoltairina” will answer all your important questions with about the same degree of accuracy as a Magic 8 Ball. Simply write your question onto a slip of paper, put it in the box, and spin the wheel to reveal your answer. The nostalgic reference to childhood desires combined with the interactive components draws many visitors to Zoltairina’s corner of the gallery, myself included.
A trio of photographs from Jenny Carey focuses on life’s fleeting moments and the forces that create them. I immediately found these photographs visually appealing, but at first I didn’t know what I was looking at. Each image was similar but different, an interesting pattern in white, tan and black. They’re all sand, and “straight photographs,” Carey tells me. I’ve never seen sand like this.
Carey shot the photographs on a trip to Costa Rica. “The water comes in and does these little drawings, then it goes out and it starts all over again,” says Carey, “Any log, small rock or leaf on the beach creates a fracture, drawing the sand into shapes of a tree, a figure, an abstract image.”
Suzanne Williamson’s photography is already well-suited to this theme. For a few years now she’s been photographing the horizon at different times of day, and assembling these photographs into interesting patterns. The skyline naturally divides her work into two components: ocean and sky.
Williamson’s latest work, “Sunshift,” shows gorgeous gradients of light rising from the horizon in a cloudless sky. The five photographs, stacked vertically, depict a series of moments. These moments happen every day as the sun rises and sets, yet somehow they are a little different each day.
When Kim Radatz created “Things I Forgot to Tell You,” she was grieving the loss of her mother. You can see Radatz processing this emotional fracture in her new work. At first glance, “Things I Forgot to Tell You” looks like a ball of stained paper, but each of those tiny papers is actually a small envelope.
Radatz wrote down all the things she wanted to tell her mother, sealing each impossible conversation into its own envelope. They all hang together from a metal chain in HCC Ybor’s Gallery 114. By the time she’d finished the piece, she realized that she’d already had these conversations before. “My mother was sick for a while,” Radatz tells me. “There was not one thing left unsaid.” So she tore open all the envelopes. Those moments had passed.
When Debra Radke found out she was about to lose her studio due to new ownership, she started cutting up prints of her work and patching them back together. It’s more than just collage. Looking at “Inifinite Paths,” I can imagine Radke thinking, Where will I go from here? She made six copies of one of her earlier works — "The Path" — and assembled them into a single work of art. Now when I look at it, I see two roads running through it. It reminds me that with each new break, or emotional fracture, there are multiple roads to healing for us to choose from. Art is one of the best.
Amanda Cooper, who selected the artwork included in this exhibition, describes it best in her statement: “Through using different vehicles, and coming from disparate perspectives, these artists of Creatives Exchange all demonstrate that there is beauty in brokenness, hope in troubled times, and that art is, once again, a healing agent for our fractured world."
As we grow older, we all experience loss, but few can turn it into art as beautiful as you’ll see at this year’s Creatives Exchange show.
Fractured Spaces | Gallery 114@HCC Ybor, 2204 N. 15th Street and Palm Ave., Tampa | Through July 31; Artist Talk with Jenny Carey, Kim Radatz, Debra Radke and Amanda Cooper Wed., July 17, 5:30-6:30 p.m. | 813-253-7674 | www.hccfl.edu/campus-life/arts/galleries-hcc/gallery114
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