Janae Easton
Golden Locks that Moss Grew, 2008
Floral foam, dried plant material, wrapping paper, Mylar, found paper, pen, colored pencil and polymer clay
Courtesy of the artist

If you haven’t been to see the exhibit Drawing Beyond the Plane at the Tampa Museum of Art, I urge you to drop everything and head over today (Saturday) to catch this small-but-wonderful show before it closes.

The museum, located at 2306 N. Howard Avenue, is open until 4 p.m. Admission is free and parking (also free) is plentiful.

It’s hardly news that drawing has come into its own as an artistic medium in recent years and that its forms are now multifarious and even encompass multimedia—but it would be difficult to come up with an exhibit that makes the statement as eloquently, given the museum’s small interim location, as this one.

In addition to some fresh faces—Janae Easton of Tallahassee, Vermonter Valerie Hird and Sara Stites of Miami—visitors will find many locally-based artists shown off to great advantage here: Maria Emilia, Leslie Fry, Marie Yoho Dorsey, Elisabeth Condon and Dominique Labauvie.

There’s not a weak link in the show, but in the interest of time and space I’ll pick three highlights.

Hird’s HEROES project, comprising a video animation as well as works on paper, makes for addictive viewing. In the several minute long video (just judging by how long my butt was parked on the bench), a parade of “heroes” morph from one to the other: Bill Gates, Superman, Napoleon, Mr. Spock, etc. Since some of the heroes might fall under the rubric “celebrity has-been” or “cult icon,” I assume the honorific is somewhat tongue-in-cheek. Certainly, I found myself pondering what makes a particular figure worthy of icon status in our culture (is there something—an archetypal appeal, perhaps—they all have in common?) in addition to greatly enjoying Hird’s skillful and gently playful renderings of the heroes.

Easton’s Golden Locks that Moss Grew offers one of the most unexpected encounters in the show. An assemblage of three-dimensional gestures crafted from dried plants and two-dimensional flowers on paper, the piece represents the freest interpretation in the show of drawing’s many possibilities as a medium. And, hey, it’s gorgeous. That never hurts.

Finally, a series of drawings by Patrick Lindhardt (a Sarasota printmaker and Ringling professor) find a welcoming context here. Presented as portholes framed in black, the pencil depictions of prosaic-looking interior and exterior scenes are punctuated by the slightest oddity, e.g., a tornado viewed through the picture window of a handsome middle class home, that adds a Lynchian note of tension to the images. Peer into them carefully for the unsettling payoff.

Valerie Hird. HEROES: Bill Gates/Superman, 2007
Video, graphite, ink, and watercolor on Bristol board, and digital prints on Mylar
Courtesy of Nohra Haime Gallery, New York