A + E

Provocative concepts 

Yes, Skyway has a pipe bomb - but there's also context.

By James Chapin

There's a bomb in the north gallery of the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Pete. It's a pipe bomb, comprised of several metal tubes and a timing mechanism, partially concealed among several other objects on a table. It isn't going to explode. A nearby placard promises the reader that it lacks the necessary active ingredients. But it is in every other sense an accurate, convincing, "real" bomb. This fact warps any discussion of the MFA's segment of Skyway: A Contemporary Collaboration, which includes many excellent examples of conceptually informed contemporary art. It becomes harder to talk about them. They all take place within this piece's radius. Two work tables and a desk chair sit in the middle of the room. They are covered in a jumble of tools and junk. There are beer cans, there are food wrappers. There is a fifive-gallon bucket of what looks like glue. A worklight cranes over the scene. It looks familiar, a slice of life from a tinkerer's garage anyplace in America. I approached it with a group of people, taking in the rich and realistic details. That was when I saw the bomb. I was standing within three feet of it, and for a split second my amygdala was sure that it was an actual explosive device. I had the urge to get away from it, quickly. I did move away, art-gallery niceties be damned. At last I read the placard's promises about the bomb's non-explosiveness. There's a political rationale for the work, titled "Worktable #9, he of Righteousness." There are carefully arranged signififiers that explain to us just what kind of person the absent bomber is supposed to be. That's what the cheap beer cans and Middle-American detritus are for. Saying something about homegrown extremism seems to be artist Gregory Green's primary aim. But it sure as hell wasn't the primary effect, at least on this viewer. That would be the queasy threat-response that the work provoked. Any thoughts of politics or society were, at best, secondary. I'd love to talk about the other works in the show — the ones that don't traffific in implied mortal peril. Especially since so many of A STITCH IN COLUMBINE: Noelle Mason's embroidered handkerchiefs offer an intimate look into the minds of the Columbine killers. The violence in Noelle Mason's "Love Yes, Skyway has a pipe bomb — but there's also context. By James Chapin the works in the MFA's Skyway happen to deal with violence in ways that are far more thoughtful, artful and useful. Anthony Record's "American Guernica" looks mythic. It shows a dark horse tumbling through space — almost as if it had been blown into the air. The animal is rendered in a strange mode that is somehow both Picasso-esque and Popeye-esque. It's striking, appealing, and troubling. There is a similar line-toeing going on in Neil Bender's work, but the balance tips toward comic glee. An entire installation is built around a cartoon Bender drew in tribute to pro-wresting idols... when he was in elementary school. (In a long list of work dates reading 2017, the program drolly lists one from 1985.) Referencing wrestling's contortions, colors, and bodily hijinks, Bender tweaks the culture of violence that created the sport — and the sexuality it doesn't show. Elsewhere, Wendy Babcox's photographs isolate and focus on every single bodily wound in the Louvre. Her total collection holds 7000 gore-spurting images. It's amazing how much of art history is built on blood. Letters/White Flag (Book of God)" is harder to spot at fifirst. It's comprised of a long wall's worth of carefully embroidered handkerchiefs. Each delicate scrap of white cloth reproduces a page from the diaries of one of the Columbine killers. She's done the same thing with surveillance footage from the shooting (Editor's note: CL's visual art critic, Caitlin Albritton, reviewed Mason's work when Tempus Projects had Boys on Film in the gallery; Albritton also has art in the Skyway exhibit). Mason's aim — which is traceable in the results and utterly fulfifilled — is "taking a craft-based approach to distressing subject matter... opting for a highly physical, timeintensive engagement." In other words, it's a way of slowing down. It's a tactile method of coping with the flflood of images that come with mass violence, and the vindictive emotions that follow on its heels. It breaks the cycle. But there's an obstacle to Mason's work. It sits about 20 feet behind it, hidden among junk on a worktable. You can't look at Mason's meticulous stitchwork without feeling the bomb at your back. Mason's work wants to help us understand and overcome violence, rejecting its methods by fifinding a way out. So it's tragic that at the MFA's Skyway, its approach is a casualty of another artist's more incendiary devices.

Proof of potential

Two fine performances and top design mark Innovocative Theatre's first mainstage offering.

By Mark E. Leib

I t's always pleasing to welcome a new and ambitious theater company to the Bay area. Innovocative Theatre, headed by Staci Sabarsky, made a big impression on me a few months ago when it offered the stunning Dark Vanilla Jungle at the Tampa International Fringe Festival, and now it has teamed with Stageworks to bring us its fifirst mainstage show, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Proof. If this production isn't quite as successful as Jungle, it still offers two memorable performances and fifirstrate design. With its next show already planned — Jane Martin's Keely & Du is coming in January — Innovocative seems poised to become a signifificant player in a theater scene that urgently needs more production companies. I wish its creators all the best as it discovers its strengths, solves its weaknesses, and brings us Off-Broadway and regional theater pieces we would otherwise miss. Proof is about Catherine (Marie-Claude Tremblay). understanding of her relationship with Hal, with that proof I mentioned and, not least, with her sister — who in this rendition has good reason for trying to get her out of Chicago. I don't think the play makes total sense with a less-than-sane Catherine, but I respect Tremblay's gamble in playing more anti-heroine than heroine. Like a cheerful song transposed to a minor, turbulent key, this portrayal has overtones that the other versions never suggested. Devin Devi's acting as Hal is less complicated — and nearly impeccable. This Hal is a good-natured, pleasant nerd who'd never think of making a pass at Catherine — she's less inhibited, as it turns out — and who seems comfortable Tremblay), a young mathematician whose father Robert (Dennis Duggan) was a celebrated genius before mental illness reduced him to scribbling nonsense. As we learn from the chronologically out-of-order scenes of the play's two acts, Catherine gave up her college education in order to look after her father once his mind got clouded. But now Robert has died, and Catherine's sister Claire (Sabarsky) has come for the funeral and to try to entice Catherine — whose own mental state Claire fifinds dubious — to relocate to New York. To complicate matters further, Robert's former student Hal has been spending hours in Catherine's house, searching Robert's notebooks for any moments of brilliance the mathematician might have had during his moments of lucidity. As Catherine, Hal and Claire work out their diffificult relationships, and as a possibly earthshattering proof turns up in a special notebook, we're faced with questions of feminism, mental health, sibling tension, and sexual propriety. Bringing it to life are four actors, two of whom are outstanding. Tremblay provides a surprising interpretation of Catherine, playing her as gloomy, moody, and quite possibly subject to some of the same disabling forces that undermined her father's psyche. I've seen two other Catherines in two other productions of Proof, and in both cases they were upbeat, charming, and, from any perspective, sane. Not so Tremblay's approach: Her Catherine is touchy and troubled, and you can't ignore the possibility that she's not entirely healthy. This matters a lot; it colors our as one of life's less demanding creatures. He's a recognizable (but not stereotypical) fifigure: The hyper-intelligent graduate student who'll spend his whole life in universities, focusing on subjects that most of the population has next to no understanding of. The other two actors aren't nearly as convincing. Director Sabarsky comes across as a two-dimensional Claire, hardly appearing to have an existence outside her concern for Catherine's sanity, and Duggan, who was so spectacular in Of Mice and Men a few years ago, seems passive and harmless, not for a minute a great thinker whose impact is still roiling the world of mathematics. Sabarsky's direction is fifine, though, and Jeannine Borzello's set, of the back and backyard of Robert and Catherine's two-story house, is entirely persuasive. If there's an overarching theme in Proof, it's the diffificulty of really knowing another human being. Catherine may or may not be sane and a prodigy; Robert may or may not be afflflicted or in remission; Hal may be intending to exploit Robert's legacy; Claire may be secretly planning to have Catherine committed... Watching these four characters navigate so many uncertainties, we're reminded that we too are largely ignorant about each other and need to tread carefully before we claim true understanding. Even in a less-than-perfect production, this idea is well-communicated and resonates beyond the fifinal curtain. So welcome, Innovocative Theatre. You've made a likable mainstage start. I look forward to seeing you develop and flflourish. Contact Mark E. Leib at theatre@creativeloafifing.com. JEANNINE BORZELLO Shufflfflffleboard Club CREATIVE LOAFING CLTAMPA.COM/CRAFTSANDDRAFTS #CLCRAFTSANDDRAFTS