New Art Exhibit Opens at Tempus Projects

Tucked away off of busy Florida Avenue, quietly carries the torch of the largely burned out Seminole Heights' art space boom of the late 1990s.

And to remind us of the sizeable artistic vein that endures in the neighborhood, the project space will host the opening of a new exhibit, "Your Body is a Punishment: Anthony Record and Justin Nelson," Saturday from 8-10 p.m. It's open to all and free, but donations are excepted. 

According to Tempus Projects' website, "Justin Bryan Nelson is a self-taught visual artist born on November 15th, 1985 in Astoria, Oregon. The work Justin has created for "Your Body is a Punishment" is a response to the visual stimulation he has received while traveling abroad. In his mixed media drawings he creates strange people, landscapes, and objects often inspired by photographs he has taken in his travels. Sometimes grotesque, sometimes beautiful, they are representative of unfamiliar experiences that he has encountered while exploring distant places."

The Tempus site adds that "Anthony Record’s paintings, drawings, and yarn works have always addressed the limits of perception and challenged the boundaries of recognition, creating works that occupy the weird place that exists between representation and abstraction. In his new work for “Your Body is a Punishment,” Record de-emphasizes the “here-ness” of the mutated and mutable bodies in his paintings. Utilizing the vocabulary of Byzantine mosaics and Late Gothic stained glass windows, Record relates the Medieval disconnect between the physical world and the heavenly spirit realm to the contemporary split between digital and physical reality, doodling manic compositions that depict a Dark Ages passion for salvation not from God but from the Internet."

Nelson and Record live and work in Tampa, though Nelson has shown his work in places as far flung as Miami, Los Angeles, New York, Australia and Spain. Record's work has been exhibited in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Toronto, Vancouver, and Japan, among other places. 

The exhibit runs through April 20, with gallery hours by appointment.