Juris Imprudence

"Boca Museum Artist Guild Juried Competition and Exhibition" and "49th Annual All Florida Competition and Exhibition"

Comments (0) By Michael Mills Thursday, Jun 22 2000

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Minimalism gets a nod in Inside/Outside, in which Carolina Sardi of Miami Beach takes 24 square steel frames and mounts them at irregular intervals on the wall. Karen Rose of Delray Beach contributes Lilies of the Lake, a mixed-media canvas that's a feeble attempt to capture the unsettling surrealism of Dali. A wall of six lackluster photographs seems to have been included just to make sure photography wasn't slighted.

Once you get past the filler, there are several fine works. The simplicity of Haze -- a large oil and acrylic on canvas by Alan Urban of Miami that's made up of 12 rectangular panels blanketed with spidery networks of purple lines -- is a refreshing contrast to some of the show's more cluttered pieces.

Slow down for Karen Phillips' Snail Town Dream: It's one of the most agreeable pieces in the show

Details

On display through July 16

Boca Raton Museum of Art, 801 W. Palmetto Park Rd., Boca Raton, 561-392-2500.

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Invisible Man, by Norman Lebeau of Palm Beach, is an amazingly evocative sculpture consisting of a pair of empty bronze jeans perched on a wooden stool. Another nearby sculpture -- Bridge Over Troubled Waters, No. 2, by Tampa artist Paul Larned -- is an unsettling conglomeration of a distorted glass foot resting on a dozen or so disembodied glass fingers, all set on a slab of stone.

A pair of pieces near the entrance to the show coolly demonstrate that less very often is more, especially in the context of an exhibition as busy as this one. With the medium-size oil on canvas Evening on the Chain, David Loughtry of Mount Dora captures the fiery glory of a Florida sunset, with its grand cloud formations and a low-flying bird punctuating the wide-open spaces.

John David Hawver of Islamorada has a similar take on the drama of the South Florida sky in From One Time to Another and This Time in Between, a large, impressionist-style oil seascape in dappled blues, peaches, and lilacs, with a tiny string of Florida Keys just barely visible in the distance. Long after the visual noise of so much of the rest of this show has subsided, the serenity of these two paintings hangs in the air like the clear tone of a bell.