Sunshine Spate

Navigating the traffic jam of diversity at Wynwood’s Edge Zones can be a touch-and-go affair. Without enough time to take it all in, it’s easy to bounce from artist to artist like a bumper car in the intricate maze of “23 Florida Zones” housed in the 22,000-square-foot space.

Therein lies the challenge, as well as the payoff. You’ll need a few hours to absorb the hundreds of drawings, sculptures, paintings, photos, videos, and mixed-media works installed throughout the sprawling two-story building, which was recently remodeled for the Edge Zones Art Fair.

The 23 artists represent all corners of the Sunshine State. For the most part, they’ve smartly tweaked their individual spaces, a handful of which merit more than a pit stop. Other than the museums and large private collections, it’s difficult to think of anywhere else in town with so much to see under one roof.

“That’s why we kept some of the work exhibited during Basel up, to give people a chance to come back and see it again,” says the nonprofit’s cofounder and director, Charo Oquet. “We also opened eight new exhibits.”

Some of the artists on different floors explore common currents in their pieces, including Hugo Patao and Miguel Guzmán, who confront the havoc of war from wildly divergent views.

Patao references a future where humans have morphed into weaponized cyborgs. Rifle Man, a digital print on canvas, depicts a side view of a man’s torso and arm, onto which an assault rifle has been grafted at the wrist.

In another bone-jarring piece, Female Suicide Bomber, Patao uses a Gray’s Anatomy-style illustration to depict a woman’s breast as a dangerous explosive. His precision and attention to detail are uncanny. The fatty tissues of the mammary are exposed to reveal a detonator and percussion cap; a grenade pin protrudes from the nipple.

In an isolated room on the second floor, Guzmán delivers a more visceral vision in nine works rife with religious iconography, the clash of ideologies, and timely political overtones.

Guzmán is no stranger to controversy. In 2004, the FBI picked him up for questioning while he was living in Fort Myers. At the time, he was creating paintings bursting with images of the Statue of Liberty, American soldiers, and Islamic militants. Some of these are on display here.

“I think someone called the FBI out of spite and said I looked like one of the terrorists on their most wanted list,” recalls Guzmán. “They questioned me in the back of a van in a parking lot, then let me go.”

In Inherit the Earth, a flatbed digital print on aluminum, Guzmán superimposes the iconic photo of American GIs raising Old Glory at Iwo Jima atop a graveyard of car tires. Venus flytraps appear in the foreground, suggesting the predatory nature of the current U.S. policy in the Middle East. “We are being lured into our own destruction while fighting for foreign resources. You wonder what type of world will take shape from the rubble when it all ends.”

David Marsh and Brian Gefen are young artists whose abstract canvases creak with a bulging harvest of fearlessly applied paint.

Heavy Blues, one of Marsh’s medium-size mixed-media-on-canvas pieces, erupts with biscuit-batter-thick sections of blue, orange, and yellow paint punctuated by a beguiling variation of textures. He thickens his emulsions with what appears to be glitter or a gritty paste, applying it to the canvas almost sculpturally.

Gefen’s Little, Little House, Little, Little Fence depicts a crudely painted house and an animal-like creature dominated by expanses of blue, yellow, orange, and pink paint. The figures seem to defy gravity and pictorial perspective.

Another young artist who leaves an impression is Samuel Gualtieri, who is exhibiting a handful of large charcoal, graphite, and acrylic works on paper in one of the second-floor galleries.

Don’t miss Fear Makes Us, a small electronic gizmo and tiny speaker rigged on a sliver of cardboard. Gualtieri’s weird contraption, with wires running from radio guts to a pair of batteries, looks like something the Unabomber might have dropped in a mailbox.

Among the more unusual works at Edge Zones are Dorothy and Mel Tanner’s ethereal Lumonics light sculptures. Their booth is illuminated in acid rainbow-hue lights that palpably vibrate off the pallid walls.

Paradigm, a wall piece by the late Mel Tanner dating from 1975, features a constellation of radiant Day-Glo orbs against an onyx background polished to a mirror finish. A Frisbee-size oval glows with fiery red, yellow, and blue streams that melt into each other not unlike the lava flow from a volcano.

Dorothy Tanner’s Rocket looks like a futuristic toy Elroy Jetson might have tinkered with. It’s brilliant gold and fuchsia exoskeleton coolly abstracts the lines of an arrow in flight.

Nearby, Charo Oquet conjures a sense of mystery with a handful of monochrome sculptures that suggest supernatural fetishes.

Into the Forest is a sculpture slathered in a moss green coat of paint and resin and precariously balanced on thin stems tucked into baby shoes. A flag juts from the powerful piece, which is freighted with plastic fruit and wicker coils topped by a naked baby doll whose limbs are bound by stout veins of rope. The spooky doll’s face is obliterated by an unsightly cowl.

Around a corner, Margaret Ross Tolbert’s paintings and lenticular photographs weave a charming tale of “Sirena,” a nymph who inhabits a freshwater spring like a Weeki Wachee mermaid. The fetching creature appears in these spellbinding images playing chess underwater and swimming with a candelabrum, all while wearing a sunbonnet and striped summer dress.

Visiting Edge Zones is almost like dining at one of those all-you-can-eat buffets. There’s just so much to swallow that you can almost feel your guts bursting before you even try to partake of it.