Meet the Owner: Tempus Projects

Don’t call Tempus Projects an art gallery, if you want co-owner Tracy Midulla Reller’s opinion. Sure, the converted garage on Florida Avenue looks and acts like most of the neighborhood galleries that have come and (mostly) gone since the Seminole Heights art space bloom of the late 1990s.

To Midulla Reller, “gallery” just sounds so … permanent. And indeed, “I needed a change,” Midulla Reller said of the time when she conceptualized Tempus Projects in late 2009.

“I wanted it to be a project space that wasn’t just based on visual art. I wanted a space where the art changes. We do hold mostly visual exhibitions, but we also screen films, had a few musical performance art shows, and art installations.”

So it’s a project space. Got it?

And Tempus’ latest project opens tonight at 8 p.m. “Return to Sender” is what Reller describes as a “non-traditional mail art show.” Traditionally, the practice of mail art involves sending art through the postal system.

“But I wanted to be more interactive than that,” said Reller. So as the show’s name implies, she asked her 130 artist recipients to add their own art to her negative silhouette print that adorns the mailer, and then send it back.

The show is comprised of the 94 pieces that were sent back to Reller. Some came from as far away as Germany and India. The rest were sent by artists in the bay area and from around the country. Reller’s most famous respondents include the Art Guys and Devo frontman Mark Mothersbaugh.

“Return to Sender”’s original piece is Reller’s “Self-Gleaning,” a negative silhouette screen print of a painting she did that depicts a dead rabbit and vulture with connected bodies.

The show’s opening reception is from 8 to 10:30 p.m. tonight. It runs through Sept. 30.

Tempus Projects
5132 N. Florida Ave.
813-340-9056
tempus-projects.com

Owners: Tracy Midulla Reller and St. Petersburg artist Ashley Niven, a former art of student of Reller’s.

Native artist: Reller is a fourth generation Tampanian with Spanish and Sicilian roots. Her great-grandfather was a cigar maker in Ybor City, and her grandfather ran Tampa Rico Cigars shop there. She grew up in Carrollwood and graduated from Gaither High School.

Road back home: Reller earned a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from the Atlanta College of Art in 1997, and a master’s degree in fine arts from Florida State University in 1999. She returned to Tampa to teach art at Wharton High School “for three miserable years,” she said, then tok adjunct professors posts at Hillsborough Community College, University of Tampa, and St. Petersburg College. In 2005 HCC hired her as a full time art professor. She currently teaches at the Ybor City campus.

Time for Tempus: Tempus Projects opened in December 2009. Reller had just finished a 10 year stint with 5[art], a non-profit artists group she co-founded based in Ybor City and West Tampa. “I wanted to find another space,” she said, so she recruited fellow 5[art]-er Niven to form Tempus.

It’s the Heights for Tempus: As for why Reller chose Seminole Heights for Tempus’ location over Tampa’s more traditional arist enclave, Ybor City, she said, “I live in Seminole Heights, and I think it’s a really creative and exciting place to live. It’s not as oversaturated as Ybor City. And I love Ybor City. It’s quieter. I think it’s more personable than Ybor, and it’s more exciting and more tangible than any of the suburbs I think the independent businesses we have here are worthy of supporting.”

Arts power couple: Midulla Reller is married to Paul Reller, a USF electronic music professor and former frontman of Clang, a popular band on the local music scene in the 1990s.