In 2021, Jaime Margary was bedridden with a nasty case of COVID-19 and spent a week suffering from the virus’s most debilitating symptoms alone. During brief moments of lucidity—his fever had spiked to 104—he glanced at his nearby art workspace and lamented the many dream projects that he had set aside.
It took Margary months to fully recover from the illness, and another year to begin working on one of those dream projects. On Thursday, November 19, an exhibition at CityArts dubbed Calamity will mark his return and highlight the result of his first post-pandemic project.
Through the exhibition, Margary—a native of Puerto Rico who uses a variety of mediums—portrays the journey of a black rabbit struggling to prevent her community’s downfall at the hands of a strange fox.
It’s a typically atypical installation for an artist who originally made a name for himself in 2010 when two of his projects—hyperrealistic polymer clay sculptures of a carnivorous Piranha Plant and a mushroom-like Goomba from the video game Super Mario Bros—went viral after being posted online.
“As excited as I was to see people from all over the world respond to my work, I felt a disconnect,” says Margary. “I realized that what was missing was the in-person conversations an artist has with the audience when a piece can be appreciated in person.”
In Calamity, frozen landscapes appear to emit light in the largest paintings, while nightmarish creatures defy notions of beauty through illustrations, 3D models and clay sculptures. Uniting the exhibition is an animated short film that sets a cinematic tone and fosters a sense of immersion in this unsettling world.
The inspiration for Calamity comes from Margary’s interest in the horror genre (no surprise there) paired with a spectacular sunset that he witnessed while on a snow-covered mountain in Utah. When he sat down to paint the sunset, he began to develop a story:
“I first pictured a fox in blue-shaded fields of snow. Almost right away I imagined the fox finding a frozen body, which then led to the question of how it got there. And then I just ran with the idea.” The show’s cold, dream-like world presents a narrative that reflects various cataclysmic events in the formation of the Earth.
“Above all else, I arrived at two theme words, one of which was ‘calamity,’” he says. The other word is what he wants the exhibition to evoke for visitors: “Hope.”
CityArts is located at 39 South Magnolia Avenue, Orlando. For more information, call 407.648.7060 or visit downtownartsdistrict.com.
