One Foot Square

O ne square foot of space may be the measure by which office real estate's determined, but it also

"One Way" by Sydney Scodras happens to be the dimension

of all the artwork at the Alliance for the Arts this month.

For those who chose to participate in the Alliance's annual members' show, the work could be no bigger than 12 inches by 12 inches.

"For most artists, creating a 12 x 12 piece is a real challenge, if they're used to creating 6-foot x 8-foot pieces," says Alliance Executive Director Louise Senneff. "But for most, it's a challenge that they liked. It made them think in a different way or create in a different way than they usually do. That's part of what we like to do, challenge artists."

The artists weren't limited by subject matter or medium, just by size. (Though one artist brazenly disregarded the size constraints.)

Thankfully, not too many artists took the "foot" part of the "One Foot Square" title literally. The exhibit contains abstracts, landscapes and portraits in paint, photography, sculpture and mixed media.

"There's a lot of interesting pieces there," says Pat Collins, whose own work, "Protecting Your Fear," is in the show. (Her mixed media piece shows two hands holding the word fear, with the entire piece covered in bubble wrap.) "The guidelines weren't too constraining, they left you open to approach it in different ways. There's more of a range of what people did, they didn't all do the same subject. They personalized it."

"A Room With A View" by Geoffrey Hamel The quality of the work veers wildly from person to person. It's not a juried show; anyone can enter simply by paying a member's fee.

"If they're a member, they bring in a piece, and it's on the wall," Senneff says. "This is one of the ways we support membership. We give them a chance to create and exhibit something in our gallery."

This year's show is one of their largest, with 99 pieces. (The Alliance has approximately 900 members.)

"We have 80 who did their first piece specifically for this show," says Senneff, "and we have the pros, people who make a living by doing and selling art, and everything in-between."

"Yellow Equation" by Stephen Johnson Though the quality varies, the show contains some real gems. From a distance, I thought Sydney Scodras's piece was a collage, but as I got closer, I realized it was a color photograph chockfull of images. Entitled "One Way," it's a nice, tight shot of one-way signs, traffic lights and billboards in NYC's Times Square. It's a clever composition with no empty space and a good example of how judicious cropping strengthens an image. The work sold during the show's opening on Aug. 10. The artist is 15, a high school student.

Stephen Johnson's "Yellow Equation" was sold before the show even officially opened, much to the disappointment of other numerous interested parties. Johnson's unique work looks like a math equation scrawled on a yellow blackboard, that already contains two rows of numbers. His image holds a mysterious appeal, giving the viewer the feeling that if you could only figure out the equation, maybe all of life would also harmoniously fall into place. But, perhaps there are too many variables.

Celeste Borah, in her "Pink Sky # 1," created a landscape that borders on abstract, with its undulating horizontal swaths of color ranging from black, deep forest green and olive to baby blue and peach.

And D.L. Shepherd's watercolor "Chicken Foot," with its image of a chicken scratching at the ground, looks as if it could have come from a children's book. It's nicely presented too, with a thin red frame echoing the red of the chicken's comb.

Patricia St. Cyr's "Stars & Stripes #2" is a perfect Pop Art piece, almost as if Robert Indiana were working in wood. Amid horizontal stripes of raised black and purple wood sits a black star against a striking blood-red circle.

Ralph Bigletti's metal sculpture shows two joined pipes sticking out of a background of yellow metal with circular cut-outs. The sealed-off spouts suggest miserliness and futility, but Bigletti calls it "An Unnatural Male Enhancement," which induced some snickers from viewers.

Toni Ferrell's work is also sculptural, but the medium is paper. In "One Foot Square," Ferrell cut out pyramid shapes from accordioned paper and the raised triangular shapes create a pattern of interesting shadows.

Perhaps the most moving piece in the show is Geoffrey Hamel's "A Room With A View." This oil painting is a portrait of the artist's 94-year-old father. The image shows him sitting in a wheelchair in a nursing home, gazing out a window on his right. Behind him a walker leans against the wall under a sepia copy of Jusepe de Ribera's painting "The Martyrdom of St. Philip." The man sits, hands folded in his lap, lost in his thoughts or his memories. Hamel's done an exquisite job with the lighting, and the piece is imbued with a sense of dignity as well as sadness.

"It's a wonderful representation of the artists in the area," says Cape Coral artist Kitty Tyler, whose own onewoman show is running concurrently at the Alliance. "It's a great body of work. All the pieces are very, very different." ¦

If you go >>What: One Foot Square Members' Show. >>Where: 10091 McGregor Blvd. >>Cost: Free >>Information: Call 939-2787 or go to www.artinlee.org