The Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art
The Alfond Inn, 300 E. New England Ave., Winter Park, 407-998-8090, thealfondinn.com
Conceived as a “visual syllabus” by its donors, Barbara and Ted Alfond, the art at Rollins College’s new on-site hotel continues the school’s mission of education. Works by established masters such as Mel Bochner and Philip-Lorca diCorcia join edgier pieces by Tracey Emin, Juan Travieso and Lalla Essaydi on walls throughout the Alfond Inn – more than 100 pieces in all, offering a free class in modern art history to anyone who takes the time to look.
Brandon Geurts
brandongeurts.com
Brandon Geurts’ work is part Ralph Bakshi scenic art and part hand-biting Necronomicon – ripe with cow skulls and bloody-kneed virgin sacrifices, floating in subterranean caverns full of whispered secrets. Which is probably why his art was chosen to grace the cover of one copy of Black Sabbath’s limited-edition “Age of Reason” single, released on Record Store Day 2014. (Like we said, limited edition.) With dark, moody ink washes emphasized by delicate line work, Geurts has developed a hauntingly surreal style that makes his work memorable and instantly recognizable. He’s moving to Tampa this fall to get his MFA, but no matter where he goes, he’ll still be one of Orlando’s best.
Jaime Margary
margary.net
Jaime Margary is a local multimedia artist whose pop-culture-focused work is gaining attention outside our city limits. His video game sculptures (“Pakku Rotundus, aka Realistic Pac-Man,” “Piranha Plant” and “Super Mario Mushroom”) blazed through Kotaku.com a couple of years ago; since then, he’s kept busy making an animated music video for Roadkill Ghost Choir’s “Bird in My Window,” designing the cover of the Plush Monsters’ new album, creating a couple of our favorite Nyan Cat videos (“Schrödinger’s Nyan Cat” and “Nyan Cat – Punk”), self-publishing a web comic at Margary.net and printing T-shirts with portraits of characters from Netflix political melodrama House of Cards and HBO bloodbath Game of Thrones. (Don’t worry, no spoilers.)
Jessy Lynn Martens as Cherlene on Archer
America doesn’t know her face yet, but after this season of FX’s Archer, they know her big voice. Local songbird Jessy Lynn Martens was the mighty wind that powered the country-star persona of Cheryl Tunt on the animated show. And under the direction of Drivin’ N Cryin’s Kevn Kinney, an entire album was made that – despite the show’s famous lack of seriousness – surprised the music world with its quality and garnered lots of positive reviews.
Eddie Huang
Your boy Eddie Huang? This is his year. Yeah, we’ve said it before, but for real – the Rollins grad/restaurateur/sneaker pimp/memoirist/based FOB has finally cracked the big big time by breaking into the wide-beam, lowest-common-denominator bastion of mediocrity that is network TV. The trailer for ABC’s series based on Fresh off the Boat, Huang’s tale of growing up Asian and hip-hop-mad in Windermere, dropped in May, whetting appetites with excerpts from the pilot starring Randall Park (Veep) and Constance Wu (Torchwood), but the premiere remains to be scheduled. Huang’s also got a cooking-battle show on MTV called Snack-off and a news talk show on Pivot with Meghan McCain (Take Part), but neither of those offers the same full-blast megaphone to America that the ABC show does. From the get, Huang has been trying to get the Asian-American experience into the mainstream, and there’s no better way than a half-hour network comedy. (Hey, it’s been 20 years since Margaret Cho tried … maybe we’re finally ready.)
Snap Space
1013 E. Colonial Drive, snaporlando.com
The old Cameo Theater, a vintage Art Deco moviehouse, now houses Patrick and Holly Kahn’s Snap Space gallery. The couple’s reputation for bringing world-class artists to Orlando through their annual Snap Orlando photography show is solid; now they have a brick-and-mortar space in which to do the same thing. Formerly from Los Angeles, the Kahns know how to put on a good show: Receptions are theatrical and exciting, you feel like one of the beautiful people, and the music, drinks and conversation keep flowing while you enjoy some great art. The future of Orlando’s art scene seems rosy.
The Dorothy Lumley Melrose Center for Technology, Innovation and Creativity
101 E. Central Blvd., 407-835-7323, tic.ocls.info
The downtown library took a public stance against going out of style by dedicating 26,000 square feet of its second floor to fostering creativity within its walls through public access to innovative technologies. Thanks to a massive donation to OCLS, the space better known simply as the Melrose Center now provides studios for photography, audio recording and video production. They also have fabrication and simulation labs, an interactive media wall and a fully wired conference room that seats 30. It’s a major step for them, but it’s a greater service to us – just another addition to the library’s other cushy offerings, like home delivery of books and free courses, both of which help advance that old-timey pursuit that goes hand in hand with innovation: knowledge.
We’ve reviewed dozens of shows currently playing at the Orlando International Fringe Festival – just head over to blogs.orlandoweekly.com to see the evidence – and we’ll review more shows opening after we go to press on this issue. But we’ve gathered our favorites so far here for you – the don’t-miss-’em best of the fest.
Oyster Boy
British company Haste Theatre’s Oyster Boy, inspired by the Tim Burton character, tells the mirthfully melancholy tale of Jim (Valeria Compagnoni), a guileless gelato vendor who meets cute with Alice (Anna Plasberg-Hill) along the seashore.
Following a fishy wedding feast, she gives birth to a boy with a shellfish skull, embodied by a charmingly crude rag-doll puppet. Shunned by noxious nosy neighbors and prodded by presumptuous physicians, Oyster Boy battles loneliness before finally returning to his oceanic origins.
An all-female quartet (Elly Beaman-Brinklow, Elena Costanzi, Jesse Dupré and ukulele-strumming Sophie Taylor) serves as a Greek chorus, narrating the fable with doo-wop-flavored harmonies and Americana folk tunes.
Staging (collectively directed by the ensemble) is elegantly inventive in its naiveté, with a simple sheet representing rippling water or a restaurant table. The balance of improv-like freshness and scripted polish reminded me of La Putain Avec les Fleurs, an old Fringe favorite that shared a similar vaudevillian sensibility.
Oyster Boy is a gentle, intimate gem awash in playful whimsy, seasoned with a splash of acidic darkness. Its magic occasionally gets a little lost in the large Silver venue (the show would be better served in Pink or Green), but it’s well worth straining your ears to hear this finely wrought fable. (60 minutes; Silver Venue; $10) – Seth Kubersky
Mark Twain’s ‘Is Shakespeare Dead?’
For the second consecutive year, Montreal’s Keir Cutler offers one of the smartest, most thought-provoking shows at Fringe. Adapting the 1909 book Is Shakespeare Dead? by Mark Twain, Cutler – using Twain’s trademark intelligence and wit – makes the strongest argument possible that William Shakespeare did not write the works credited to him.
This is no stodgy period performance of Twain. Instead, Cutler himself – attired in formal lawyer’s garb – painstakingly makes the argument to us, the jury, not just that the greatest collection of works in the English language were written by people other than Will, but that we’re “surmisers” and “troglodytes” who have been tricked into believing a laughable myth. This reviewer has neither the time nor credentials to fully refute Twain, except to note that facts, even when correct on their face, can be woven together in such a way as to present inaccuracy. But without a Shakespearean scholar to mount the stage upon Cutler’s exit and take to task Twain’s claims, one must admit that his arguments are breathtakingly convincing and will leave you scrambling for your history books.
That Cutler’s show provokes us and challenges our cherished assumptions is a credit not just to the genius of the works of Shakespeare, regardless of who penned them, but to Cutler’s command of his topic and his audience. The production is not quite as polished or powerful as last year’s Teaching Shakespeare, but it’s still one of the few must-sees of the festival. And though Cutler skewers Shakespeare the man, it’s to his credit that he fully embraces the canon. (45 minutes; Red Venue; $11) – Cameron Meier
The Surprise
Martin Dockery isn’t comfortable with the label “storyteller,” yet that’s what he is. Oh, not the sock-puppets-and-kiddies type of storyteller that he’s sure you imagine when you hear the word; no, Dockery is one of those guys who can pluck a moment out of life’s sprawling randomness and, with his keenly stylized delivery, find the meaning in it and shape it into a gem.
Dockery is a longtime Orlando Fringe favorite, one of four traveling storytellers we profiled in last week’s Fringe preview. His offering at this year’s festival tells the story of his discovery that his very repressed father has, upon retiring, remarried and begun a new family. In Vietnam. Without telling anyone. In other words, Dockery has a brand-new set of siblings, and they’re 36 years younger than he is — and half-Vietnamese. This discovery is interwoven with the realization that his relationship is either on the point of dissolving or deepening; neither he nor his girlfriend is sure yet which it will be.
As Dockery expounds in his utterly unique voice – by turns raspy, yelpy, growly, half-strangled – upon the “epic game of emotional chicken” his father is playing (which, in fact, he and his girlfriend are also playing), we realize that the surprise of the sudden half-siblings is not the titular surprise. Rather, the ways people act, their essential unknowability, the unpredictable nature of love – that’s the surprise. That’s always the surprise. (60 minutes;Yellow Venue; $11) – Jessica Bryce Young
My Brooklyn Hamlet: A Meshugenah True Story
Brenda Adelman has a story to tell – and it is totally meshugenah. In 1995, Adelman’s mother was shot dead under mysterious circumstances. The only suspect was her father, a charming womanizer whose turbulent relationship with her mother was a hallmark of Adelman’s childhood. He claimed no memory of what happened, and Adelman (something of a daddy’s girl) initially put her trust in him. Within six months, her father married her mother’s sister and refused to acknowledge what he called “the past.” Even after he was released from prison after serving more than two years for manslaughter, he refused to talk about what really happened. As a result, Adelman spent much of her adult life haunted by self-doubt – unhappy, stressed and angry.
This one-woman show illustrates how intensely family dysfunction impacted Adelman’s perception of the world. She tells her story through dark, wickedly funny anecdotes that are laugh-out-loud hilarious, but also gut-wrenching. Adelman punctuates her narrative sparingly with passages from Hamlet – a daring move, since it places her in danger of moving into cliché territory. But Adelman’s delivery of the Bard’s lines is skillful and emotionally moving, bringing a fresh perspective to the centuries-old words and giving Adelman a way to express true despair without alienating her audience.
Adelman’s story isn’t entirely a tragedy. Despite the resentment she harbored for many years – and the final fuck-you doled out by her father after he died – her story is more of a celebration than a dirge. In addition to documenting some of the darkest moments of her past, she also tells the story of how she dragged herself out of anguish and pieced her life together again.
Adelman’s delivery is full of little imperfections, but somehow her quirks and stumbles are more endearing than annoying, reminding us that this play is based on real life – and like real life, some of its beauty can be found in its imperfections. (60 minutes; Blue Venue; $10) – Erin Sullivan
Pillowlando
twitter.com/pillowlando
Once hosted by eclectic performance artist Brian Feldman – who has since moved on – and now run by the über-dorable Tony Bolante, Pillowlando is a part of the international Pillow Fight Day effort. This is more than just hitting strangers with a sack of feathers, though. It’s a part of something bigger – a movement. For 30 whole minutes attendees scream, curse and wallop each other in the face. Then, when time is up, they march back to their cars, exhausted but strangely serene.
“Culture Pop: Roll, Repeat,” March 14, 2014
Art & History Museums – Maitland, 231 W. Packwood Ave., Maitland, 407-539-2181, artandhistory.org
March 2014 was an art-lover’s dream, thanks to Art31, the monthlong multifaceted celebration of creativity produced by Maitland’s Art & History Museums. Each day of the month brought at least one way to express our enthusiasm for art, whether it be looking at it, learning about it or making it. The rubber really met the road, though, on March 14, when the museum brought out a steamroller – yes, a steamroller – to press prints in front of guests at their monthly Culture Pop art party. Woodblocks by Whitney Broadaway, Rebecca Sexton Larson, Cat Snapp and Chris Ware were cradled in padding on Packwood Avenue, inked and topped with paper – then eight tons of metal rolled right over them. Heavy.
