Already well-established as a hotbed for adventurous Orlando art, the Casselberry Art and Sculpture House complex will soon host perhaps its most adventurous vision yet.
Local arts collective Psych Cat — who have been putting on multimedia happenings since 2016, signal-boosting local creativity through a prism of mystique — will be weaving their mysterious and immersive magic at the Sculpture House through August with Unknown Forest.
Event Details
With a title that brings to mind The Cure at their most enigmatically opaque, Unknown Forest brings together works from Leo Cordovi, Caitlen Lyberg, Sapphire Servellon and Scott White, as well as the collaborative "Toad Venom Pond" installation.
"Psych Cat as a collective bases all of its showcases within the set theme and the styles of each specific artist. We never ask the artist to make something outside of their practice but rather we find the connecting point of everyone's work," explains curator Servellon of their working methods to foster creativity. "Caitlen Lyberg got her BFA in sculpture from Kent State University, and Scott White's — a local legend — installation works are beyond compare!"
Less the usual group exhibition and more an attempt to resculpt gallerygoers' perception of reality — if only for a few moments — Psych Cat's ambitious brief is to create "a fantastical land of psychedelic joy and petrifying uncertainty." The participating cats are up to the task, working in a variety of mediums, from paintings to immersive multimedia.
"Close to Touch" by Caitlen Lyberg suggests disembodied hands pulling endless puppet strings — very adroitly capturing a storm-tossed sense of helplessness circa the now. Acrylic work by Leo Cordovi evokes the theme of nature's mysteries with appropriate visceral foreboding: light peeking between painfully stripped branches looks more like rivers of blood than comforting warmth. "The God of Life and Death Is a Doe Lost in the Snow" by Servellon provides a momentary — though disorienting — respite with a cartoonish deer against an impossibly rich sunset, seemingly removing a mask with an identical face beneath? Nothing is what it seems in this forest.
The crux of this exhibition is the "Toad Venom Pond" installation, which is a product of both the collective's fascination with the psychedelic and commitment to working together to create new worlds.
We can't fully experience the 10-foot-by-10-foot installation that combines sound art, sculpture, paintings and careful stagecraft until the opening night on Friday, but Servellon was willing to give us a brief peep behind the ethereal curtain; the overall impression given is a heady merger of sensory-deprivation chamber and 1960s be-in, with a hint of Fluxus mischief.
"'Toad Venom Pond' is an immersive psychedelic decompression area with body-size lily pads for the audience to relax in. Surrounding the area are Leo Cordovi's gorgeous forestscape paintings," explains Servellon. "Casey Lerman of Timothy Eerie produced the music for the pond. Being a local psych-pop musician, his meditative trance sends you on a journey of the life and death of a toad."
There is one piece of the exhibit that particularly pinged this writer's radar, and that's the inclusion of a zine that shares the title of the exhibition. A hybrid of stark dread and whimsy, Alexander Escobar's zine is a travelog of wide-eyed wonder — as the spiral-eyed hero (a cat, natch) makes their way through rural landscapes, haunted by shadows, before entering a forebodingly (?) cat-shaped portal to the Unknown Forest.
"Not only do we create installations and curate exhibits, we're a publisher! Zines have been our bread and butter since the beginning. A typical trade-off for any artist that exhibited with us is that we publish a zine for them of whatever they want and vice versa," says Servellon. "With Alexander Escobar — creative director of SR50 magazine — also a part of this collective, he designed the comic strip of our 'psych cat' on a journey. Coming across an abandoned cabin, through a door he sees a path to the 'Unknown Forest.'"
You owe it to yourself, in an increasingly fast-forward, dystopian year, to follow that feline and get delightfully lost with Psych Cat.
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