Art exhibition at Orlando City Hall shows a ‘melancholy, romantic, hopeful America’
A new exhibit at Orlando City Hall’s Terrace Gallery showcases vignettes of imagined scenes and American pop culture dissected, pulled apart and reimagined in new ways.
Shadowboxes, paintings and assemblages by Orlando-based artist Kyle, who teaches studio art at Valencia College, are on display through Jan. 28 in a show curated by Pat Greene, the City of Orlando’s public art coordinator. The Terrace Gallery is a 2,000-square-foot space on the first floor of City Hall that showcases local, national and international artists.
Some of the artist’s work draws on recognizable imagery from movies, comics and world events, while other works create new scenes with small toys and figures.
“Some of these are found images, others are cases where he found inspiration from an artist and created an interpretation in that style,” Greene said. “It feels like if you saw your life going before your eyes but with pop culture. It feels like an overview of imagery that you’ve seen but kind of redone or reinterpreted.”
The title for the exhibition, “Kyle: A One Act Play, as it Really Happened,” draws from a 1987 Esquire article written by playwright Sam Shepard based on a conversation he had with Bob Dylan. While the exhibit doesn’t have specific ties to either of those iconic American minds, some similar themes arise.
As Greene explains in his curator statement, the works in this exhibit reveal an “imagined, cinematic view of landscapes, automobiles, spaceships, trains, faces, fashions and structures encountered in both the natural world and as voyeurs of pop culture.”
The shadowboxes appear as small scenes from a movie or views one might encounter on a road trip —shrunk down into frames. Viewers are invited to walk between these miniature stories and attach their own interpretations to them, along with the images that are juxtaposed just below.
Some might see these small sculptural works or assemblages fabricated with toys and action figures and wonder why they belong in a museum. But, as Greene explains, this sort of draws on the idea popularized by French painter and sculptor Marcel Duchamp, who once famously displayed a urinal in a museum.
“If you decide it’s art, it’s art,” Greene said. “This show is pretty accessible but it has layers. The first layer has Darth Vader or something that reminds them of something they’re interested in.”
One large painting features “Star Wars” scenes, the Flash and the Apollo 11 splashdown, juxtaposing a fabricated Hollywood outer space with astronauts returning from up among the stars. In all of it, there’s a sense of nostalgia that harkens to a “melancholy, romantic, hopeful America, where the American Dream is a detour rather than the destination,” as Greene writes.
Ultimately, the exhibit explores the range of one artist’s imagination as Kyle works in several different media, inviting viewers to see what strikes them as familiar and what new scenes pique their own curiosity.
If you go
“Kyle: A One Act Play, as it Really Happened” is open 9 a.m.-5 p.m. daily at 400 South Orange Ave. in Orlando. For more information, visit orlando.gov.
Find me @PConnPie on Instagram or send me an email: pconnolly@orlandosentinel.com.
