“Open Air” Wild Space Gallery

“Open Air” at Wild Space Gallery

September 14 – October 26, 2024

Open Air is collaboratively curated by Raheem Fitzgerald, Tony Palms, and Noel Smith.

In Open Air, Tampa Bay-based artists Scott Fisher, Babs Reingold, and David Waterman explore various aspects of our changing urban environment through painting, drawing, sculpture, and photography. Florida attracts growing numbers of new inhabitants, and while natural areas fall to development, our cities are also experiencing alterations to their topography via the construction of new roads, bridges, and buildings.

Babs Reingold’s graphite drawings of felled trees from her Old Southeast neighborhood reveal the beauty and vulnerability of these essential entities. Her sculptural works feature soft silken ladders that connect humans, animals and trees in a struggle to survive and overcome. Taken together the works suggest the existential and real poverty arising from the diminishment of our natural environment.

Scott Fisher’s loose and free brushstrokes describe a world in flux. In one painting, a cement pier built for interstate expansion resembles a strange thorny tree planted in a concrete island, all green vegetation swept aside. In another work, a bright red “Wrong Way” sign bars entrance to a jungle of palmettos and mangroves.

David Waterman’s projected black and white photographs direct our eyes from the heavens to the earth and back. Working with an iPhone camera, the artist has focused on the open sky, and captured dynamic cloudscapes and subtle tonalities. In contrast, his closeup images of road surfaces, constantly redrawn by tire traffic, oil, and weather, are graphic testaments to the accretion of daily acts that lead, inexorably and for better or worse, to lasting change.

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