65 Cover Reveal
The cover art, titled Spell of Twilight States, is by Andy Kehoe.
Tampa Review 65 also contains art by Sandra Hunter and Mike King.
A Conversation with Cover Artist Andy Kehoe
Issue 65 is off to the printer, and we will reveal our cover soon! As part of our countdown to the new issue, art editor Leslie Vega has interviewed our cover artist, Andy Kehoe. Kehoe creates evocative work in both the traditional and digital realms. With nods to mythopoetic fantasy and folklore, his paintings feature figures so small that you may not notice them ensconced in trees and moonlight. These animal-human hybrids beckon us into Dante’s dark forest or a Grimm’s fairytale, and we really wouldn’t mind joining them.
Leslie Vega: Tell me a bit about your process. Does it differ between your paintings and your digital works? They look remarkably similar.
Andy Kehoe: The process with my traditional and digital paintings is actually pretty similar in a lot of ways, especially in the beginning stages. With both mediums, I have pieces that are very planned out, which will involve detailed sketches and some black-and-white studies. Then I have paintings that are more loose and improvisational. I’ll just start throwing paint and textures down —whether they be oil paints or pixels— and see where it takes me. I also tend to work in layers from back to front, which I do with both mediums.
The major difference is the crazy flexibility of digital work. I can move and rescale different components or change the entire color palette on the fly. There is so much freedom to experiment, readjust, and improvise. [I] love that aspect of working in digital.
Oh, and I can also finish a digital painting in days to weeks, instead of months with my traditional work. With digital, I can get my ideas down and out there into the world rather quickly, which is awesome. With traditional painting, the process is much more prolonged so my initial concept often evolves and shifts with what has inspired me and affected my life along the way. That brings a different quality to the work, which I very much love and appreciate.
LV: Your work is influenced by fantasy and sci-fi art, which has been heavily shaped by epic poetry, myth, folk tales, 19th– and 20th-century fantasy, and current speculative fiction. What are your go-to works of poetry or literature to draw upon for inspiration?
AK: Folklore and fairy tales really shaped my young, imaginative mind when I was growing up. There’s a certain indescribable feeling that those stories gave me, which was amplified by the fact that I was young, and all of life was a mystery. Much of my work is trying to tap back into that specific feeling and to bring some mystery back into people’s lives. It’s a tough thing to do these days, with all the answers to the universe at our finger tips—living a constant existence peeking behind the curtain. I feel like this breeds a real desire for worlds that encompass mystery and diverge from the mundane, such as the realms of fantasy and sci-fi.
Currently, I listen to a lot of audio books as I work, with the vast majority being in the fantasy genre. The biggest draw to fantasy writing for me is the world building. Creating a believable world where unbelievable things happen is some tricky business and also a such a tantalizing prospect. Authors like Brandon Sanderson, Scott Lynch, and Joe Abercrombie excel at creating very rich, unique, detailed worlds that you can lose yourself in. This kind of imaginative thinking really fuels my creative mind while working.
LV: And who are your favorite illustrators?
AK: Some contemporary artists I love are Aron Wiesenfeld, Kilian Eng, Boris Pelcer, and James Jean. I’m also inspired by legendary fantasy artists like Michael Whelan and Paul Lehr, and painters like 19th Century Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich.
LV: Working both in traditional painting as well as digital, what do you think about AI generated art applications such as DALL.E 2?
AK: The debate on AI art is a tricky, layered one. Kind of a mess right now. A real mixed bag scenario. On one hand, it’s very cool technology that makes some truly amazing imagery. It’s also really fun to see what crazy things you can come up with and get immediate results.
On the other hand, it’s creating this imagery by training its AI through the use of copyrighted imagery without artists’ consent. That’s a big negative and a big problem. I’ve rarely seen any technology go so quickly from “Wow this is cool” to “This is a travesty. Burn it all down!” The vitriol for AI art in the community is intense because of this non-consensual image usage. An uproar I totally agree with.
We are definitely wading into unknown legal territory in which distinctive boundaries will (hopefully) have to be drawn. It feels like this technology is here to stay, so where those lines end up is anyone’s guess, but [it] will have ever-lasting ramifications for visual artists. I know music IP is protected very staunchly by the law, and the industry would not put up with this kind of unfettered usage one bit. I’m hoping visual art can be treated equally.
Personally, I have played around with Midjourney and I’ve used it as a tool to work through concepts and to get some fresh perspectives. But I’ve never used it to make completed art work and never would. Interestingly, I can just use my own name in the prompts to get a new concept inspired by my paintings… but that also means my copyrighted work is in the database without my consent. Since I’m the original artist, is it then OK to used unlicensed images of my own work to create something new? Like I said, it’s a mixed, convoluted bag.
LV: Do you have any projects in the works that you’d like to share?
AK: I have a Patreon page where I’ve been making a digital painting every month and posting it. That’s where I post most of my new work these days.
This year I have a couple [of] group shows, then next year I have a solo show at Outré Gallery in Melbourne, Australia. The best way to keep updated is to sign up for my newsletter, which can be found in the contact page on my website.
A Poem on the Death of Poetry by Jon Davis
Issue 65 of Tampa Review is off to the printer! To celebrate, we are sharing one of its featured poems, apropos of recent discussions on the death of poetry.
Jon Davis is the author of six chapbooks and seven full-length poetry collections, including Above the Bejeweled City (Grid Books, 2021) and Choose Your Own America (FLP, 2022). Davis also co-translated Iraqi poet Naseer Hassan’s Dayplaces (Tebot Bach, 2017). He has received a Lannan Literary Award, the Lavan Prize, and two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. He taught for 28 years at the Institute of American Indian Arts and founded, in 2013, the IAIA low residency MFA in Creative Writing, which he directed until his retirement in 2018. A new collection, Anathematica, is forthcoming from Grid Books in 2024.
After the Death of Poetry
It was success that killed it. It had lived
peacefully in the small village of its making
for years. We’d see it occasionally, or pass
an open door in summer where someone
was standing at a podium and speaking
in that way we recognized, and we would nod
and continue on with our day, assured
that it was surviving the way an endangered
tortoise survives, lumbering the endless desert
until it finds another tortoise, a small tuft
of grass. Or we’d see a line of thin books
in a bookstore, a stack of homely journals,
and think, good, they’re still singing, this
oddly plain species, from the treetops and hills.
Their songs were not for everyone, knotted
and braided as they were, but we liked
that they were making and sharing them.
If we thought bless their hearts, it was more
to praise their devotions than to satirize them.
But then, things began to change. Their songs
got louder, simpler. They began appearing
on buses and trains, on screens, sounding
from street corners and bars and phones.
At times they ranted, at times they wept.
And an amazing thing happened: We started,
slowly at first, to understand
what they were saying. At last, we could stand
and cheer and not worry that we’d
missed the point. Yes, we thought,
your father was mean! Yes, the police
are brutal and, yes, racist! Yes, the yellow
butterflies bring us peace. They are emblems
of light and soulfulness and beauty.
And, oh, the patriarchy of it all! And
you loved your dog but he died. And
that boyfriend truly was, as you say
so pointedly, a bastard! Now we can
grieve with you on this bus huffing
and swaying down Fifth. We can hear you,
brothers and sisters, as we wait
for the DJ to arrive, the woman to tune
her guitar. Soon, we understood,
everyone is a poet. Every utterance, once
spread across the page, a poem! Eventually,
we could no longer tell what was poetry
and what was talk. And that’s the way
we wanted it. We realized that the poets
had been making us feel inadequate.
Even our unspoken contempt for them
had been driven by our feelings of failure–
to hear, to understand the complexity
of their writings. Now that poetry was dead,
really dead, we could finally enjoy it.
But then a strange thing happened. We started
missing it. The way you might miss a jungle
you’d never visited, a mountain you’d
only seen in photographs. We wandered
the streets hoping to lean into a gallery
and hear those cadences, those baffling
metaphors, see the audience members turn
to each other, sharing some secret,
some mysterious companionship
that made us envious. We missed
ignoring them, missed knowing they
were settling like a flock of sparrows
into an elm at dusk, chirping softly
as night filtered through the branches, sifting
finally into the bones of those dark, drowsing birds.
The “Low” Poetics of Barbara Jane Reyes: A Review of Letters to a Young Brown Girl
by Paul T. Corrigan
Tampa Review Poetry Editor
What is it like to be a young brown girl, especially a Filipina immigrant, in the United States? Well, there are pitfalls, attests Barbara Jane Reyes in her latest book of poems, Letters to a Young Brown Girl (BOA 2020), which begins, “If you want to know what we are . . .” (p. 9). But, she hastens to add, fuck the pitfalls and sing your own song. Three of those words—fuck, sing, and you—stand out as keys to understanding the whole book. Letters consists of three sections: a set of prose poems under the heading of “Brown Girl Designation,” a set of free verse poems linked to specific pop songs and assembled as a “Mixtape,” and a set of epistolary poems with the same title as the book, each beginning “Dear Brown Girl.” While only that last section is overtly written as letters, the whole book has an epistolary spirit, central to Reye’s low—even “lowing”—poetics of muck, music, and mutually constitutive interconnections.
The first key word is fuck. In Wanna Peek Into My Notebook? Notes on Pinay Liminality (Paloma 2022), a collection of prose offering insights into her poetics, Reyes lays out the lived context for her use of coarse language in her poems: “The world in which we live, work, and write is messy, and it is full of injustice and violence; it needs us to bring our ruckus. We are at our best when we are scrappy; when we are noisy and unruly, unashamed of profanity, irreverence, and taboo” (p. 35). More specifically, she adds that she wrote Letters “For brown girls who have taken weaponized gender and cultural expectations of white supremacism, and said, Fuck You” (Wanna, p. 134). Appearing and reappearing throughout Letters in various forms the word “fuck” signals a particular poetics at work (pp. 10, 11, 15, 16, 18, 25, 26, 46, 47, 51, and 63).
Reyes unpacks her poetics of fuck in the first “Dear Brown Girl” poem, “[They will say, your language lacks finesse].” In this poem, Reyes invokes a harmful dichotomy of poetry built by those who would degenerate the eponymous brown girl’s words—a dichotomy between a high poetics and a low one. On the one hand, Reyes explains, “they” will claim “their well-lit high poetic annals” (p. 51). Consisting of canonical poems written primarily by white men, those annals value such formal literary qualities as elegance, complexity, and finesses—formal qualities that the brown girl’s words, on the other hand, are said to lack. “Dear Brown Girl, / They will say, your language lacks finesse, your words low . . . you are simple, making inelegant noise. You are lowing” (p. 51). Her use of the word lowing, the sound cows make, followed by reference to the addressee as “some brown cow,” indicts a sexist, fatphobic commonplace (p. 51). But “they,” the poemsplainers, are not just wrong to use the slur, they are also wrong about poetry. “High” formal qualities are not the only way to write poems. To the contrary, “you” have reasons to write differently. “You” have reasons to write poems that may be (perceived as) “coarse,” “beastly,” “monster[ous],” “hollar[ing]” (p. 51). “You” purposefully write with a different set of formal qualities to accomplish a definite function. “You” write to resist. But, with a sudden shift of pronouns, you becoming I, they addressed as you, Reyes speaks back to “them” directly: “My noise is inelegant, because I’m throwing f-bombs at you, motherfucker” (p. 51).
As a poetics, “fuck” speaks to the irreverence necessary to throw off oppressive racial and gender expectations and to tell off those trying to control you. Poetry doesn’t have to be tidy because life isn’t. “Our literature,” Reyes elaborates, “is about how we suffer, work, cope, survive, get gritty and fight, persevere, and celebrate. Then get back to work again . . . this literature exists in the real world, written by real people, working people who live in the real gritty, brutal world” (Wanna, p. 82). In short, “fuck” signifies a poetics of ruckus and reality. It’s about agency, resistance, recognition of what’s what. It’s about asserting one’s own language on one’s own terms. The poetics of fuck rejects control dressed up as decorum. The poetics of fuck represents an attitude, a stance, and a series of formal choices: a tone of defiance, content reflecting social realism, and a serious engagement with “low” culture, including “profanity,” popular music, letters, and mixtapes—all drawn from and speaking to the muck of real life.
But real life is not only muck. It is also music. The “lowing” of the poems in Letters is song—literally so in “Brown Girl Mixtape,” the middle section of the book, where each poem is titled after a work of popular music, including Mary J. Blige’s “My Life” and Pinay’s “Dahil Sa Iyo” (pp. 30, 34). Mixtape is a low cultural form Reyes specifically contrasts with the forms of “High Literature.” She explains, “A more accessible means of communication for those like me, thwarted by ‘High Literature,’ is the mixtape, where tone/mood, rhythm/music, and lyric intersect in accessible units and media. . . . Before digital music, constructing mixtape was a manual and tactile labor of love. It was DIY. It was gift and keepsake” (Wanna, p. 108). Given the importance of this music in the book and Reyes’s association between music and love, it makes sense that the word sing would be another key to understanding the Letters, appearing in various forms almost as frequently as fuck (pp. 12, 13, 23, 27, 32, 34, 37, 45).
The import of sing to the book as a whole might be most directly heard in one of those mixtape poems: “Track: ‘A Girl in Trouble (Is a Temporary Thing),’ Romeo Void (1984).” The first line of this poem serves as a subtitle—“Brown Girl Sings Whalesong”—while the second introduces another fatphobic slur that “they say,” presumably the same “they” as in the epistolary poem discussed above. “When they say you are as big as a lumpy, blubbery whale,” Reyes begins but then, as with the cow reference, immediately reverses the insult, rejecting white male standards for poems and bodies without ceding an inch of poetry or beauty: “you may go ahead and bellow deep. Creak, / croon, and trill, moan low” (p. 32). In other words, when they go “high,” you low. The remainder of the poem continues in the same direction, celebrating positive aspects of literal whales in ways that take on clear figurative significance: “your heart is larger than a full-grown man. Your lungs carry air for us all. / Your ribcage could be a refuge. Your skull is a cavern of deep song” (p. 32). Whales have an ancient and ancestral connection to water. Whales have long lives and memories. Whales’ bodies (perhaps too much like The Giving Tree) supply oil that lights lanterns. Whales communicate with family through song. The poem ends with another pronoun shift (at least, this does not sound like the same “they” as in the first line) and more singing: “They say the earth’s most unruly parts sing like you” (p. 32). Reclaiming the majesty of the whale as an actual animal, the poem also elevates the whale to a metaphor for a majestic way of being and making music in the world.
In some ways, the poetics of sing might seem the opposite of the poetics of fuck—lifting up what is beautiful rather than knocking down what is awful. But for Reyes the two poetic modes share much in common (including low forms) and exist side by side, as this same whalesong poem shows. Though thirteen of the poem’s lines praise whales, that one hideous body-shaming line remains. The insult of calling a woman a whale is a verbal assault on whales, on women who do not fit the strictures of sexist, racist, classist body ideals, and on figurative language itself, since, on top of everything else wrong with it, it’s a cliche. All that ugly is permanently part of the poem. But by seeing and raising the cliche to actual metaphor, Reyes situates the beauty in the context of and in refutation of the ugly. Such juxtaposition is a built-in part of the poetics of sing. In this poem and throughout the book, the key word sing speaks to the urgency and possibility of raising one’s voice, of being heard, and of making beauty despite everything. Without fuck, the poetics of sing would be sickly sweet, false. But without sing, the poetics of fuck would fall short, beginning and ending with resistance, opposition, defiance. Sing brings in the necessary complements of celebration, beauty, intimacy, grief, love.
Another “low” literary form Reyes uses in Letters is in fact personal letters, the epistolary, which she notes has historically often been “where and when women and girls even have time, space, and permission to write” (Wanna, p. 37). Reyes describes the physicality of writing letters in a way similar to what she says, quoted above, about the physicality of constructing mixtapes. “Before email, before texting,” she explains, “epistolary was a manual and tactile art making. It was handwritten with just the right implement—ink color, nib or point, heft of the thing in your hand—on just the right paper—wide, college, or narrow ruled, grid, weight and texture, color, stationery design—with the right postage stamps—hearts, rainbows, comic book characters, historical figures. All of this speaks to meaningful, high emotional stakes human connection. It also speaks of aesthetics” (Wanna 107). Although Letters does not include literal stationary and stamps, the history of physical letters invoked by the epistolary form helps the book leverage the aesthetics of human connection, most obviously in those poems that begin “Dear Brown Girl” (including the one discussed above) but most pervasively through Reyes’s use of direct address. The second person pronoun “you”—the third key word for understanding Letters—works the epistolary mode into the whole book, with versions of the word appearing on almost every single page of the book (except pp. 31, 35, 44, 59, 37, 40, which use first person).
As noted above, who the word “you” refers to shifts throughout the book. Mostly, “you” refers directly to the young brown girls for and to whom Reyes is literally writing. But “you” can instead refer to those oppressing young brown girls, as in Reyes’s comment about “throwing f-bombs at you” quoted above. Moreover, you might mean “one” (the general you) or even “I” (which we might call the lyric-you). This shifting happens on purpose, as Reyes makes clear when she complicates the word in the poem “Brown Girl Fields Many Questions” on the very first page of the book—shedding light on the larger implications of the second person pronoun for the book and for her poetics as a whole: “the ‘you,’ is really meant to be an ‘I,’ a ‘we,’ regardless of whether the hearer, onlooker, or reader wishes to be included or addressed, . . .” (Letters, p. 9). In this definition, the second person may encompass the first and third persons. Reyes writes of and to an expansive “you”—a “you” inescapably intertwined with others, whether you like it or not.
To understand this conception of “you,” we need to consider the Filipino (Tagalog) concepts of kapwa and loób, about which Reyes writes, “I return to my study, growing understanding, and practice of Filipino core values and concepts which for me become the heart of the matter—kapwa, loób. In other words, I return to my center. I write from there” (Wanna, p. 107). The words loób and kapwa, which themselves appear several times in Letters, speak to Filipino conceptions of interiority and interconnectedness, respectively (pp. 61, 62, 63, 64, 60, 61, 65). In Wanna, Reyes associates these values with the letter and mixtape forms: “Aren’t these [forms] the places we come to understand how we are connected to one another—kapwa. Aren’t these the places where soul-bearing necessarily happens—loób” (p. 108). Thus, the epistolary use of you expresses those deeper, spiritual visions that are represented by letters and letter writing: connections with others, soul bearing, soul sharing. It is with a sense of our mutually constitutive interconnections that Reyes writes to you, about you, and as you.
After “Brown Girl Fields Many Questions” defines you and several other terms, the poem turns to the questions in question, a long list of mucky, gritty punches in the gut, most of which start with “what’s it like when . . .,” then describe painful experiences. One example: “what’s it like to have white people coming up so close, gawking and poking at your flat little nose, your little body, touching your silky hair” (Letters, p. 9). Another: “what’s it like when they say your boys are hoodlums and your sisters are indecent, all your girls are whores, just go back to where you came from, go back to where you came from, go back because you don’t belong here, because we never wanted you in our neighborhood” (p. 11). Follow the pronouns. These questions are something that “you” ask, per a comment earlier in the poem, “Here are some questions you might consider” (p. 9, emphasis added). But these questions also describe things that happen to you, per the repetition of “your . . . your . . . your . . . your . . . your . . . your” and “you . . . you . . . you” in these two questions alone (9, 11, emphasis added). The implication is that the expansive you is stuck in this shit as both asker and askee. “You” are asking this, about yourself, “your” boys, “your” girls. “They” may be the ones saying these awful things, but, per Reyes’s definition, even “they” may be included in the “you,” too. So the poetics of you are not separable from the poetics of fuck: fuck you and you’re fucked, too.
But you sing, too. The poetics of you are also not separable from the poetics of sing. Indeed, the questions do start as shit but then they shift. In Reyes’s book, being a young brown girl is far from all and only negative. One of the final questions in the poem illustrates this shift: “how are you still here breathing, working, bustling like a motherfucker” (p. 11). This question begins not with what is it like but with how, coming across less as a question and more as a declaration of awe. You may be fucked. But you are still here. You are breathing. You are working. You are bustling—which, as Urban Dictionary explains, means operating at “an unusually high degree of intensity.” While this hard first poem of the book refuses to retreat into false triumph, it nonetheless meets the brutal facts of racism, sexism, capitalism with the brute force of survival, of hustle, of presence, of persistence. You have Reyes singing your praises, in songs as multifaceted and even contradictory as “you” are. Letters is a book with a message. While so-called high literature may (pretend to) eschew such messages (Keats’s “palpable designs”), low literature gets to have something to say, gets to say it directly. The message of Letters does not outweigh its aesthetic and formal poetic choices because it is one of its aesthetic and formal poetic choices. The message, indexed through the book’s three key words, is that “you” will have to reject the definitions, demands, and discriminations of others and exert your own agency. But this isn’t a message of individualism because “you” exist in context, community, contradictory connection with countless others, even including those who would do you harm (“you” harming “yourself”). “In this fast and gritty place,” Reyes writes of herself and, especially, other Pinay writers, “we are creating spaces for us to congregate, to explore and hone our craft, to amplify. We are defining our own literary and artistic traditions. We are not asking for anyone’s permission” (Wanna, p. 151). In the muck, “you” (“we”) can sing, have to sing, are already singing.
“Cooler than a museum, smarter than a theme park, and weirder than a carnival:” An Interview with Crab Devil Collective
For the 63/64 issue, we spoke to members of Crab Devil, an art collective based in Tampa, FL. Art Editor Leslie Vega’s interview is reproduced here:
The Peninsularium is an immersive interactive art attraction that will undoubtedly draw the crowds. Crab Devil is adamant about bringing a sense of wonder and excitement to both locals and visitors when the Peninsularium finally opens its doors. In my discussion with two principal members of the Crab Devil collective, Janine Awai and Devon Brady, we talk about the importance of conveying a sense of place and the necessity of supporting and promoting area artists in the service of local enrichment. Our extensive focus on Tampa as a distinctive city is not surprising. Tampa Bay is experiencing massive economic and population growth, and keeping Tampa weird is a priority.
The Peninsularium is not just a tourist lure, a quirky roadside stop, or even a gallery of art; it’s a marker that Tampa is growing into its potential as a cultural destination.
https://www.crabdevil.com
Leslie Vega: Let’s begin with the origins of Crab Devil and the collective. Are all the members from Tampa, and did the art collective sort of evolve in parallel with The Peninsularium project?
Devon Brady: Yes, all of the members are at least long-term Tampa residents. Twenty years or more. There are three Tampa natives. Myself, Tracy, and Gianna. Jan’s been here since college.
Janine Awai: And everybody else has been here since their college days. There’s nine of us total. We are all entrenched.
LV: I asked that because, at least among the people I know, so many of us are transplants, and it’s hard to get a sense of place. I feel like the theme of The Peninsularium is, of course, Tampa.
JA: It’s a little broader… it’s Florida—
DB: —But very Tampa centric, right. And, you know, when we talk to people about it, and talk to investors about it, we’re always pitching that idea in different ways. You know, there’s people that want to see Tampa recognized as a cultural destination, and there are people that want to see Tampa recognized for its food, its music. There’re other ways to approach it; some people have an inferiority complex that comes along with being from Tampa. It’s interesting to kind of play into that in a way to get people on board and to say, even if you’re not 100% interested in what it is specifically that we’re doing, what we’re trying to do here is raise the tide for all the boats so that if you have other projects that are poised to benefit off of an increased interest in Tampa as a cultural destination, that’s a reason for you to get involved with us too. To just kind of jumpstart everything that’s going on here.
LV: Yeah, the more the merrier, right.
JA: And I think that one of our objectives is to elevate all the things that people take for granted here in Tampa—they’re pretty awesome, pretty unique things. Really unique history. And also, there are a lot of reasons that people move here. There are things that are attractive about this area. Even if you just look at the flora, fauna, you know, those are things that we gloss over all the time, but it’s still Florida, it’s still a part of our everyday psyche.
LV: Yeah, so I kind of want to lean into the weird Florida aspects [of the Peninsularium], and in particular, Tampa, as opposed to St. Pete, because I think of them more as boroughs. But other people are like, “Oh, that’s a different city.” And of course, St. Pete has historically always had more of the art scene. I’m really interested and excited to see Tampa tap into all the beautiful weird stuff that’s here, and I just wanted to get your take and understand more about the uniqueness of what’s here.
DB: Well, first, I would say that the idea that St. Pete is more of an arts destination is to me, after forty-seven years here, that’s kind of a relatively new idea. When I was in high school, and even going through art school at USF (The University of South Florida), that wasn’t really a thing. St. Pete, in the last twenty years or so, has done a good job of branding itself that way and encouraging very visible things like murals, you know. St. Pete had a lot more murals than Tampa ever had or still does have, and to a lot of people’s minds that makes it a destination for the arts. I’m kind of like, famously cantankerous about murals, but that’s just my thing.
LV: [laughs] How come?
DB: Well, first of all, I love shitty old industrial buildings. And I like it when they’re shitty, old, and industrial. I don’t like it when somebody paints a big mural on the side of one of them…. It’s always kind of saying, like, don’t look at this thing. Imagine that it’s something else, you know. I’m always interested in architecture and spaces, and so the murals that I really dislike are murals that employ things like force perspective where they’re trying to create an illusion of depth on a flat surface. That was a beautiful, flat surface before somebody came and painted a horrible mural, you know. There’s a lot of bad murals out there.
[laughter]
JA: I’m not opposed to them. But there are so many badly rendered murals. When I think of murals, I think of WPA, right. Like Diego Rivera. Beautiful—
DB: —But also, when you look at the Diego Rivera murals in Rockefeller Center—those were prepared spaces to take murals, you know. They built these walls with these proscenium arches and prepared these flat spaces to accept a mural. They didn’t come and paint over a building with this image that’s drawing your attention away from the building.
JA: But for me, you can do that sort of thing on a building and have it work well.
LV: Have you guys been to Philadelphia? They have a whole funded Mural Arts Project and people take tours of the murals around the city: they have these in a lot of other cities too. And, I’m laughing because, yeah, there’s a lot of bad ones. But it’s also a big tourist draw.
DB and JA: Right. Right.
DB: But I think that it’s a good distinction between Tampa and St. Pete, because Tampa has always had an art scene, as has St. Pete. And St. Pete’s has always been a little different than Tampa’s. And they nurtured and grew what they had there. And that’s all great. But I’m more partial to what Tampa has and has always had because it’s a different scene. It’s more conceptually based. It’s grittier. It’s a little harder to digest. Yeah, a lot of that is because of the academic influence of USF, because USF is a very conceptually based art program. St. Pete has always had a strong emphasis on craft, which is great.
[This is to] draw a distinction between what you will see from us and what you see from Fairgrounds (an immersive art space in St. Pete) over there. Their work is more poppy with brighter colors, with cleaner lines that is in keeping with a more St. Pete aesthetic, you know, and if you look around here, it’s like, there’s no straight lines. It’s all organic. Things have moss growing on them, so it’s a different approach. Fairgrounds has been great with us—we talked openly from the beginning about making some differentiation between us and them. The ultimate goal is that you can buy a two-day ticket to visit both places. Having more of this sort of thing is just better.
JA: The moss growing on things reflects our approach to Florida because if you stand still too long, the moss is gonna grow on you. [laughs]
LV: Oh, yeah. It’s so much about decay, right?
JA: It’s about decay, it’s about swamps. It’s about this little atmosphere that we live in. And I think that instead of trying to ignore that and sweep it out of your house, you know, we’re letting it in, because that’s a part of what makes Florida Florida. It’s about the uncomfortable things.
LV: That’s what makes it way more interesting to me personally. I think you both articulated a lot of my thoughts that I’ve had about Tampa over the years. When we first moved here, we thought we should live in St. Pete; it’s so much nicer, you can walk down the main street. Tampa is more exciting because it’s growing. There’s an opportunity here to sculpt and shape your neighborhood. And it’s grittier, definitely.
DB: This is why I got into a project like this because I’ve always been a booster for this area. I have plenty of friends as artists who finished up at USF and moved to New York to pursue their career in New York, which anyone who was thinking logically about how to have a career as an artist would and should do, you know, go to the place where the thing is happening. If you’re an actor, you don’t stay in Branson, Missouri, you go to fucking LA and start trying to get jobs. And eventually you will, if you work hard enough, you will—that’s the way that it works. But what I always said to people was like, in Tampa, if you stay here, if something cool happens, either you did it yourself, or you know the person who did it—here’s only that many degrees of separation….Here we have to do it all ourselves and suffer all of the pains that go along with that, so it’s only for a certain type of person.
JA: For sure, it’s difficult, it has been difficult to convince the people that they want to see the show.
LV: It’s interesting to see the reality of how this stuff can come to be. Are you going to charge admission?
DB and JA: Yes. Yeah.
JA: We were going for the idea that The Peninsularium is a ticketed, admission-based attraction with art installations. People are going to go through, and at the end there will be some kind of identification so that they can know which artists were involved. Tempus Projects (a local non-profit art gallery) will be on site, and so hopefully they will also then be able to go to a more traditional art venue, and see some of those artists’ work in Tempus, and we can help push them towards maybe acquiring and collecting the art. Building a collector community, our community in Tampa, is important to elevate the whole art culture here. I mean, that’s what New York has.
LV: Sure. And there is money here, of course.
DB: Yeah, you have to be able to make a living as an artist in order for there to be a real art scene here. And that’s the nut that hasn’t yet been cracked. And you see all these efforts, which are great, you know—we need to have affordable housing for artists, and we need to have an arts district. All of that stuff is good. But nobody buys art from an artist—that’s the third leg of the stool that has to be there. And so, in order to make that happen, this is the project: you have to sell the validity of Tampa as a place to buy art from, and that its artists have their own perspective and viewpoint on their own terms.
JA: We’re viewing The Peninsularium as a bridge to that summit, a way to make art more accessible and more approachable to the general community.
DB: And that’s something that hasn’t really happened in these other places…. This is a pathway in for people to experience art in a way that they haven’t experienced it, and then walk out from this experience and go into a traditional gallery setting and see the name on the wall and go, oh, that person made the thing that I just saw in there…
JA: That’s really, really important.
DB: … and now I could take home a piece for not a whole lot of money, and then the wheels start turning about how this all works.
JA: We definitely want to promote the artists who are involved, all of them, so that they get something out of this and their names are definitely associated with their work. And that’s something that I think a lot of immersive art installation places have not done so well.
DB: Yeah, I don’t think it’s something that they do intentionally, but I think they struggle with how to highlight the individual artists and show whose work is whose without breaking the fourth wall of the experience.
LV: It becomes like an Epcot Center sort of thing, where people aren’t specifically thinking about who’s actually making the stuff. It’s just kind of turns into all one thing.
JA: Yeah. And that’s great, you know, for the whole experience. You don’t want to pull people out of it, but at some point in time you have to give the right attribution, make sure those people who are participating in this are getting something out of it. You can send visitors to these artists’ spaces and show them we have their work over here. Get to know these people. A lot of them are local artists. These are the artists in our community.
LV: People won’t have to pay to go to Tempus. That will still be a separate thing, right?
JA: Yes, Tempus is a non-profit. And so, they’re not a part of The Peninsularium.
LV: They will just be attached in the same space.
JA: Right, just like Deviant Libation brewery will be a separate entity: they are tenants.
DB: But the idea here was that we could create this kind of symbiosis. We [The Peninsularium] could hopefully attract a few 100,000 visitors a year, some percentage of which make their way through Tempus, which is a few 1,000 more people a year than they have typically seen, so we increase their exposure by a huge amount. And then in returning the favor, Tempus has already this established roster of artists and contacts and people that they work with and a respected name and a visiting artists residency program that’s been up and running for years.
JA: They are a traditional contemporary art gallery, yes.
DB: So that’ll help us to attract artists, larger names, and more mid-career artists. We’re still looking at a lot of local artists and non-established artists, but it also helps to have some of those bigger name people here, and Tempus has those contacts…. But now that we’re kind of working together, we can have somebody come down, do a project for Tempus, we can consult with them about building out a larger environment for Crab Devil, which might be, you know, a $15,000 or $20,000 or $25,000 commission for them. So now you’re talking about a real serious project that could be a person’s half of their year producing something like that. So, there’s a draw for them to come and work with Tempus and be able to work closely with us and see what we’re doing. And we can kind of tap into their network of contacts, bringing people here and then doing the same thing with the brewery (Deviant Libation). We bring people through there because they’re there already. They’ve got beer to be sold. People like to hang out and drink beer! It’s good for everybody.
JA: It gets their attention!
DB: And it helps with our customer retention.
LV: Bolstering each other up. That’s super exciting! That leads me to my question of what’s with the Bait Shop.
DB: Well, it came from a bunch of different directions. I’ve always had kind of an obsession with what are the last few vestiges of mom-and-pop businesses that have not been franchised and corporatized and sanitized. And when you think about it, there’s only like a few. There are barber shops, tattoo parlors, nail salons, and bait shops would be another one. There was never a Blockbuster Video of bait shops. They’re all their own weird little thing. And in Florida especially, we’re surrounded by water. So that’s just one of those things that, growing up in Florida as a kid, it was one of those environments that you’re going to where there’s little objects of fascination all around, like the rubber worms that smelled like that weird oil they put on them and they had sparkly glitter in them, you know, and lead weights, and all kinds of weird little hardware and stuff that you don’t see elsewhere, you know, so it was always kind of like a place of intrigue as a kid.
Tracy and Sarah came to us with that idea. We were kind of casting about for, like, what is the first experience that introduces you to this whole thing?
JA: Something very Florida. Something also kind of in keeping with this roadside attraction concept.
DB: Yeah, DIY, and that’s kind of the whole narrative that we talked about, making it known that these things are made by human hands. We call it the artifacts of artifice; we never cover over the mechanism.
What I like to see the most is young children, especially young girls experiencing art because I think they aren’t encouraged to investigate mechanical things. They walk up from a distance with a big smile on their face, and they’re like, look at this big crazy trippy thing, and they walk up underneath it, and they’re looking up at it and just enjoying it for the illusion that it is. And then a minute goes by, and you see them looking closer at it, and then making their way around to where the motor and the gears and everything are. And then you can see the wheels in their heads turning— “Oh, that spins that way, and it turns this gear, which spins in the opposite direction, and now these two shafts are moving in opposite directions, and they’re two oppositely oriented spirals, and they’re spiraling into each other, and that’s what creates the illusion.” And you see the moment when they figure it out. And then they go back to it and they’re like, it’s still cool!
LV: It doesn’t take away from the magic.
DB: Magic, to me, is the understanding that it’s of human hands and minds. And we create it; we’re the ones that make the magic and that’s the whole message. We did this out of our own brains.
LV: With these big immersive installation experiences like The Peninsularium, how do you foresee people interacting with the space? Will people be able to touch things?
DB: They’ll be able to touch, and they’ll be able to move through and investigate the spaces. There are a lot of kinetic elements. And like I said, it’s all that kind of old school mechanical stuff—
LV: —Sort of circus-y.
DB: Yeah, there’s a lot of those kinds of elements. There are also narrative elements to be discovered through audio and through text and through ephemera. So, there’s that whole kind of aspect to things as well. And yeah, I think, people will experience it in different ways…. We’ve been calling it an all-ages show in a punk rock sense, you know. It’s an all-ages show, might not be for everybody and you’re all welcome to come, but there’s not going to be, like, overtly sexual content, at least not to be viewed by the eyes of the children.
We’re working on an audio element in the vein of a silent disco kind of thing where you have a headset that you can switch between channels…. So when you give a kid a headset, that headset only gets two of the three channels, so you can all be standing in the space, experiencing the same thing. But mom and dad might be listening to something different than what the kids are listening to.
JA: And then just physically navigating through this space, the mere fact that it’s in shipping containers, as opposed to, you know, a bowling alley, in comparison, it’s going to make the experience a lot different, because of the dimensions of the space. So our intention is to have people lose their way, and then find that there’s the potential for more discovery.
DB: Another difference here is that there’s going to be a lot of these transitions from interior to exterior spaces. The way these containers go together is this kind of grid to create all these little courtyard spaces between them. So a lot of times you don’t move straight from container to container, you step outside and then back in.
JA: And there’s going to be programming in all those spaces.
DB: We can landscape and do things in those spaces, which I think really differentiates us from any other immersive experience that I’ve seen, because I haven’t seen anything that has really involved the landscape.
JA: And that is another place where Florida steps in—the outdoors. That’s a huge part of being in Florida. I think that that is going to be an added experience for us.
LV: That’s wonderful…. You mentioned ephemera. So where do you think archives fit into all this? I’m sure you have pictures of Old Florida and memorabilia, and you’re collecting all this stuff.
JA: And we’ll be creating some things, some things that are printed, photographs. And then some of those things will possibly be available to investigate more closely or even purchase. There’s going to be a bus at the end, outside of [The Peninsularium] experience by the gift shop, which is going to be a place where there’ll be a lot of printed matter—
DB: —Pamphlets and literature and takeaways and things like that. But also, in the way that we’re approaching things, we’re kind of always trying to keep it up in the air as to where the reality stops and the fantasy starts. So we want to tell actual, historical stories about the area. And those things get weird enough that you’re not sure you know where the line is. It’s a trick because you also don’t want to have it filtered too much the other way in that people take fantasy as reality and go telling a story that’s not true. There are all these cool stories and history here that people don’t know about and that people will get excited for; it’s really about creating an identity. When you tell someone you are from Tampa, they will have a sense of exactly what that means.
The Peninsularium will open in 2023.