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Arts: Column

Torolab: One Degree Celsius

Published 08.27.08

"Combat Medic's Mom," a pencil, blood, shotgunned canvas and raw silk that has been burnt with coals by Lee Lee, on display in The Human Condition, at C. Emerson Fine Arts.

This summer, New York's P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center became the media darling of an otherwise sleepy off-season when the Queens institution installed a functional, modular farm in its courtyard. P.F.1, or Public Farm One -- the brainchild of two young architects -- turned out tomatoes, beans, herbs and greens under the hot summer sun and helped the museum harvest a bumper crop of publicity online and off. Now Tampa gets its own urban landscape intervention. Torolab, a Tijuana-based consortium of artists, architects and designers, turned its eye on T-town earlier this year at the invitation of USF's Contemporary Art Museum. What they saw in downtown -- namely, a sea of sun-absorbing pavement and parking lots -- inspired the group to design a system of gardens that could introduce patches of shade, color and edible produce to the city's struggling core, if implemented. Though the project will exist only as an exhibit of Torolab's designs and a hydroponic "laboratory" inside the museum, the group's members are "not idealists" and intend the gardens to be fully realizable, says curator Izabel Galliera. "Ideally, they'll be inspiring to someone in the community who will say, 'Let's do this outdoors,'" she says. Torolab: One Degree Celsius coincides with another exhibit, MashUp, devoted to destruction as a theme in visual art, pop culture and music, and a Sept. 12 colloquium on socially engaged art featuring nationally-known scholars and Torolab founder Raul Cardenas Osuna, among others. For more information, go to usfcam.usf.edu. Aug. 25-Oct. 4; Colloquium: Art as a Catalyst for Social Transformation, Sept. 12. USF Contemporary Art Museum, 4202 E. Fowler Ave., CAM 101, Tampa, 813-974-4133, usfcam.usf.edu.

Return to the Fall Arts guide.