[This is part two of a three-part article on the Theo Wujcik retrospective now on exhibit at the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery on the Lee campus of Edison State College in Fort Myers.]
In 1970, Theo Wujcik landed in Tampa, where he assumed the position of shop director of Graphicstudio, an innovative print shop headquartered at the University of South Florida. That's where he first met and formed a fast friendship with pop artist James Rosenquist, who'd just relocated from New York to Aripeka, a picturesque town located just south of Weeki Wachee Gardens on the Gulf Coast.
The decade passed relatively uneventfully, but the calm was shattered in 1979 when Theo's marriage ended. That freed the artist to join the underground punk scene in Ybor City. There, he and some USF students founded Mododado, a nihilistic art group that used recycled junk from trash bins to create multi-media artworks.
"Andy Warhol would paint from 9 to 5 every day and then grab his camera and go hang out with the wealthy. He lived his art. I did too," the artist teased during the Gallery Talk portion of his reception at the Rauschenberg Gallery last Friday night. "I hung out at the punk clubs drinking and dancing all night. I still have a few moves."
Wujcik's experience dumpster-diving and scrounging around for recycled material, has informed his current work, a collection of multi-media works he calls his Jade Series.
"I was going to dinner in Ybor City with a friend," Theo explained. "We saw a pile of wood that looked like something we might use and came back to investigate after we ate. When we turned over the wood, we saw all of these Jade screens. 'They're mine,' I shouted right away. 'Yeah, they're yours,' my friend immediately agreed."
Not only are the mixed media works a departure from Wujcik's medium of choice (acrylic on canvas), but at 12 x 9" to 23 x 20," they are considerably smaller than his large scale renderings like Mythical Hero (115 x 90"), Cross-Cultural (111 x 78") and Indy Jones (115 x 90"). The new series consists of Jade, bottle caps, wood, acrylic and fiber and is a metaphor for the marriage of East and West in the world of art today, a world the artist sees shifting inexorably to China in the coming years.
[MORE]
Comments