"Video of the Week" -- Marcus Jansen A Painter's Allegory -- by Florida Fine Art Blog

This is a preview of the the new documentary about Florida artist Marcus Jansen.

The documentary premiered last Saturday (March 26th) at the Sidney & Berne Art Center in Fort Myers, Florida.  It was part of the Fort Myers Film Festival.  "Marcus Jansen A Painter's Allegory" was produced by Eric Raddatz, Flip Minott, Hank Sorrick & Edward Clay. Marcus was also chosen to do the Film Festival Posters.  

You can find my Artist Spotlight with Marcus here

Marcus Jansen website

New Book of Poems by Florida Artist Sean Sexton -- by Florida Fine Art Blog

 

Blood Writing 

poems by Sean Sexton

Florida Artist Sean Sexton has just come out with a new book of poetry.  Sean is a third generation Florida cattle man, a fine artist, author of children's books and now poems.  A real Renaissance man and one of the nicest men I have ever met.  I hope to be featuring Sean in my Artist Spotlight soon.

Good Article by American Press about Sean Sexton

Buy Sean's Book of Poems Here

Famliy Matters -- Jillian Mayer at David Castillo -- posted by Florida Fine Art Blog

April 9 - May 7, 2011
Reception Saturday, April 9, 6-9 pm

David Castillo Gallery is proud to present Jillian Mayer's solo exhibition Family Matters. Adopting a varied command of performance, sculpture, video, and drawing, Mayer's work is a hybrid of media culture.
The artist forays into the pseudo-science of young adulthood, the chemistry of love and relationships, and the tipping point of paradox with all the saturation of 1980s Saturday morning television. While the intuition of Penny from Inspector Gadget or the cleverness of Gadget from Rescue Rangers defeated a villain each week, Mayer's work reads as excerpted frames from nonlinear narratives. Unlike scripted television, Mayer guarantees no resolution, and the viewer is left pondering long past thirty minutes.
Mayer's protagonists are young people and anthropomorphic animals searching for a lodestar in an age when the glow of personal laptops and urban neon renders the night sky unreadable. In the perpetual dawn or dusk of our technological, virtual, intrapersonal, and experienced realities, Mayer identifies both imagination and captivity, rudimentariness and neo-futurism, popular entertainment and moral critique of which Beatrix Potter would approve. The Tale of Peter Rabbit is as inwardly complex and tragicomic as the cartoons, and later sitcoms, that provided stability through Mayer's nomadic upbringing.
In Getting to know you, an ongoing series that exists as performance, sculpture, and photographs, participants position themselves inside cut-out board scenes reminiscent of amusement park photo ops. The adopted milieu is often a disconcerting domestic realm with an air of passivity despite the contortion of the participant's body. Participants flop like mute ventriloquist dolls caught between two worlds-- literally part of Mayer's object narrative-- Peter Rabbit and Roger Rabbit-- a tourist in their own time.
Mayer's video work also explores disturbance within calmness, perversity within cuteness, and perniciousness within sentimentality. Inspired by her own teacup Chihuahua, Mayer uses the relationship between humans and domesticated animals to comment on the nuclear family, gender roles, dominant and submissive relationships, and the trope of heterosexual love. Her work is a contemporary incarnation of Potter's Museum of Curiosities, that barometer of Victorian culture that used sweet but stuffed rabbits, kittens, and guinea pigs to portray elaborate scenes of daily life.
The artist's nationality is youth and her conflict is one between personal identity and contemporary displacement. The seemingly passive act of watching television or staging participants in a performance of inaction for Getting to know you, is as Rush famously sings: "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice."
Jillian Mayer was born in Miami, FL and received her BFA from Florida International University in 2007.

David Castillo Gallery

New Paintings by James Hutchinson -- by Florida Fine Art Blog

James Hutchinson

Newest member to the Florida Artist Hall of Fame

The Elliott Museum  -  Stuart, Florida

Saturday, March 25th 2011  -  4pm to 7pm

Join the Hutchinson's this Saturday night to celebrate Jim's induction into the Florida Artist Hall of Fame.  30 or so new paintings will be on display.  Jim received his awarded Wednesday night in Tallahassee.  I will be blogging about the ceremony, which I was lucky enough to attend,  hopefully tomorrow.

Kevin & Jim Hutchinson website

The Elliott Museum website