Homecoming. That Paradise Feeling: Florida as Motif and Warning

The Drawing Room Gallery - The Lodge, Savannah, GA.

By Madeleine Peck Wagner

Paradise is a tricky place, not least because the best way to monetize it is to develop it-or so that’s the message the state of Florida’s leaders have been sending for decades. In that state’s crush of sprawling, automobile-centric development which is extraordinary about the place is (in many instances) lost, leaving only the traces of what once was beautiful, tangled and dangerous. And it is here, in this liminal space between ideal and cement-paved that the current paintings of Honor Bowman Hall and Gregory Eltringham aka “Friendship Magic Collective” cheekily reside. Their show, “Homecoming,” takes a look at the vagaries, contradictions, and frequent grossness of the sunshine state (looking at you, “Florida Man”).

For context, Friendship Magic is the moniker that Eltringham and Bowman Hall have hung around their sympathetic studio practices (it’s worth noting that FMC is a collective of two people). Perhaps that’s the best way to talk about the works they’ve hung: sunshine absurdity echoing with social/environmental commentary and comedy. The name “Homecoming” refers in equal parts to Bowman Hall’s return to Savannah where she’s lived several times (she was previously in Alaska), and Eltringham’s own varied and quasi-ill-fated turns (often on sofas) in the state.

Greg Eltringham, Florida Craigslist Orgy Couple, 2019, acrylic on panel, 36" x 48."

In terms of developing a theme and ideological approach to “Homecoming,” the work was less determined by a desire for total thematic unity, and more by an approach grounded in curiosity and organic experimentation. The result is a tightly knit show that evinces a kind of Coney Island feeling of sharp-eyed observation composed in sympathetic hues (aesthetic and ideological). Hung in the intimate space of The Drawing Room Gallery at The Lodge Savannah, Bowman Hall’s works are executed in a manner that recall sign-painting, Alex Katz and Ed Ruscha. Her work takes cues from the visible aspects of streetscapes, quoting views that echo the just-barely glimpsed scenes of passive, manicured lives as one walks or drives by.

These compositions currently fall into two camps: larger works that directly reference Florida, and smaller paint pen on paper drawings that look to the signage of Savannah. Taken together they reflect a landscape that while not devoid of human manipulation, is restfully devoid of humans. Backyard Slide harkens to that first of pool upgrades, the water slide. Arching above a geometric cement wall, against a dreamy purple pink sky, with lush greenery acting as a mid-field border, the fiberglass shell of a water slide holds the eye and the imagination, nodding towards mundane summers transformed, victory arches, or, depending on the viewer’s lens, a pre-ruin.

Adjacent to Slide, is Eltringham’s Florida Craigslist Orgy Couple. By providing this salacious bit of narrative information, Eltringham’s works expand the world that Bowman-Hall has built. His figure-focused paintings point out the smug contradictory experience of American life. These works are situated in Florida, because of his own experiences in Florida which include memories of his then-circa 1974-recently divorced father’s turn towards a post-married lifestyle that asserted he’d “get more kicks at 36,” or at the very least informed his sartorial choices (cue “kicks” t-shirt). And kicks may or may not be where the Orgy Couple enter the story. In the painting, there are two figures: one male, one female; both are reddish-tanned and taut-in the manner that grapes are full-almost-to-bursting. Both feel inoculated against the responsibility they owe their community and their better selves-perhaps it’s their presentation: bulbous hairstyles, receding chins that melt straight into neck, their penile noses, or their paired bikini tops (his black triangle halter top accentuating particularly swollen nipples). Or perhaps it is the way this viewer imagines they move through the world, a kind of hazy obliviousness wherein even though they are together, they are siloed and apart.

There’s a lot of dignity-even if it is sometimes shabby-in the world Bowman Hall has constructed, but then, a “guest” like Eltringham’s “MC Cheeks Convention” shows up. Wearing short swim trunks pulled pelvis-breakingly high with a pipe for accessory, it’s beyond resistance to not imagine that on his way to the gathering, he’d probably stopped at the Rosette Lounge for a drink. Or maybe he stopped by Charles J. Russo’s because he read they have the best-steamed shrimp in Savannah on an Instagram influencer’s post. As depicted by Bowman Hall, these small works represent the manner in which she maps and catalogues her physical environment. Since they are literal representations of signage/spots in her life, they have an urgency that is communicated even in truncated form. Imagining the uber blonde Cheeks wandering through a neighborhood space, well, it’d be a bit like seeing prep schools boys mugging for the camera in a drive-through liquor store. As a blundering, entitled action, Cheeks inhabiting multiple spaces with neither modesty nor respect serves as an apt metaphor for the current political moment, yes; but also as a kind of culmination of the desire to both inhabit “authenticity” without bearing the burden of being authentic.

Honor Bowman, Backyard Slide, 2019, acrylic on panel, 36” x 48."

Thinking about Florida in this milieu is to be thinking about a specific set of contradictions, ones firmly grounded at the intersection of beauty and commerce; public and private; access and luxury-ten percent of Florida’s GDP rolls in through tourism dollars. On any given day of the year, there are folks in sensible vehicles accompanied by quarrelsome little dogs on their way south from a variety of northern locales (Michigan, Ohio and Quebec leap to mind). They, like so many before them, come in quest of the real treasure there: that paradise feeling (and no state income tax).

Reflection on “Homecoming” is like another person’s nervous laughter: satisfying yet vaguely unsettling. And not just because both artists deploy the kind of information that gives the viewer just enough information to construct a narrative, but not so much that the works are hermetically sealed. The artists slide commentary into humor, while also indicting that American culture which went from optimistic change to contrarian deniers who yet still seek a kind of democratic parity steeped in individualism. In using Floridian tropes, Bowman Hall and Eltringham have, by serving up arch-eyebrowed disdain, presented a reminder that to observe the world is to participate in it.

(April 4 - April 18, 2019)

Madeleine Peck Wagner is an artist and writer based in Jacksonville, FL. She has a B.F.A. from Clark University, and an M.F.A. from Savannah College of Art and Design.

Filed Under: Reviews