'Picturesque' art exhibit is larger-than-life

You're watching the Fox 13 four o'clock news. Welcome back. You've heard the phrase bigger is better. Well, a new art exhibit at USF is taking that quite literally. Fox 13 photojournalist Barry Wong shows us what makes picturesque larger than life. Welcome to the Contemporary Art Museum at USF. This is my first retrospective in the US. I'm Ellen Harvey and the show is called picturesque. So here we have the Disappointed Tourist, which is a piece I've been working on since 2019, and I have painted over 300 places that members of the public have submitted in response to the question, is there some place that I would like to visit or revisit that no longer exists? In many cases, pieces need to be big, because they are big questions, and there are a lot of different answers all of my projects come from this sort of larger question of what is art for like why do we have art why do we look at the world and try to see it as a picture that's where the title comes from this idea of looking at the world and seeing it as a picture and today we see things through screens you might in the past have seen a thing through a painting or you might have seen it through a polaroid or a postcard all these different ways that we have of depicting the world and experiencing the world around us and how that influences how we relate to it this is the mermaid two incompatible systems intimately linked and it represents about two years of painting by me it's a painting of a diagonal slice of florida going all the way from the everglades the tail of the mermaid to miami beach the head and it's really about the kind of collective drawing that we're all doing together on the face of our planet and what that looks like i want my art to seduce people into thinking if i make a piece i want it to create a conversation i want it to be sufficiently beautiful and well made and fascinating that people come and they're like oh my god that's so cool i love that that's so interesting but then i want them to be surprised be like oh i hadn't thought about it this way or i'd never thought about this and then to go and talk to another person art is about physically encountering something and then hopefully having it be fascinating enough that you then reach out to another person to share it picturesque will be on display at USS Contemporary Art Museum until early march very nice