The 31st Tallahassee International Reception
Event Details
Sidelined at the Mardi Gras
August 29 – October 2, 2016
Opening Reception September 2, 2016 5:00 – 8:00pm
Stephanie Karamitsos, Cartographic Korea, acrylic painting / collage on hard board, 24 x 36 inches.
The Tallahassee International is an annual, juried competition sponsored by the Florida State University Museum of Fine Arts and juried by faculty from the College of Fine Arts.
This year’s International proves that narrative art is as vibrant and eccentric as ever: William A. Brown is an Emeritus Senior Lecturer at Emory University, whose slow motion video of a parade route shows a goofy slice of Americana. In contrast with the thousands of drunken revelers elsewhere, Brown’s Mardi Gras “crowds” are about 4 people deep along tidy fencing on a clean rainy day in Pensacola. As Brown’s lens pans the celebrants, each person becomes an actor in a comedy of time and place.
J.M. Culver, Return to Sender, oil and charcoal on Canvas, 24 x 24 inches.
Artist Stephanie Karamitsos from Chicago lifts her imagery from news photos of the Hermit Kingdom of North Korea: audiences of lovely young women (with tears of admiration in their eyes) applaud Kim Jong Un’s achievements against a fragmented pattern of cartography.
In Return to Sender, J. M. Culver throws us the keys to the narrative and we have to intuit a meaning, if we like, or simply enjoy the abstract components: Scout Master and troupe, flag in the distance, Pinocchio noses glimpsed through a glass, darkly.
In addition to the mini-dramas of narrative, there are artworks of constructivist ingenuity, sculpture, abstract painting, photography, installation, fiber, and collage. Each artwork in the International has been selected because it stood out among the competition submissions: this year, unusual media combinations and unanticipated points of view come to Tallahassee from artists across the continental United States, from Canada, Israel and South America.