Reconstructing the Rubble of Memory: Inside The Werk Gallery’s Newest Double-Feature
by Avery Anderson
Memory is a notoriously terrible archivist. It rarely saves the raw, objective files of our lives; instead, it saves vibes, pixelated fragments of places that no longer exist, and inside jokes we’ve half-forgotten the punchlines to.
This summer, downtown St. Petersburg’s The Werk Gallery is leaning directly into that beautiful, fragmented unreliability. Running from July 3 through August 2, 2026, the gallery is playing host to two concurrent exhibitions that tackle memory, nostalgia, and rapid urban transformation. It features artists from Tampa, Sarasota, New York, and Los Angeles who approach the passage of time with techniques ranging from meticulous hand-cut paper to tactile, oozing ceramics and deconstructed street photography.
Here is your essential guide to the stories unfolding on the gallery floors.
Main Gallery: “Hiss! BOOM! Squat!: Philomena Marano and Deon Blackwell”
The title of the Main Gallery exhibition reads like an old-school comic book sound effect sequence, which is entirely the point. The show explores how a single, isolated word or sudden visual pop can trigger an entire avalanche of personal narrative.
The Precision of Paradise
Artist Philomena Marano (Sarasota/NYC) is a master of papier collé—an elegant, intensely grueling cut-paper technique she picked up while working as a studio assistant to the legendary pop-art preeminent Robert Indiana. If you think your hobby scissors are up to the task, think again: every single line, shape, and explosive color gradient in Marano's work is an individual piece of paper, painstakingly sliced by hand and glued down to a substrate.
Marano’s work captures the grit and candy-colored wonder of everyday spectacles. She spent decades chronicling the raw excitement of Coney Island (even co-founding the Coney Island Historical Society), before moving to Sarasota in 2017 and turning her blades toward circus life and tropical ecosystems.
The Anatomy of an Inside Joke
Sharing the Main Gallery space is Tampa-based artist Deon Blackwell, whose ceramic works act as the perfect conceptual foil to Marano's flat surfaces. Blackwell—who currently serves as the Adult Education Director for the Dunedin Fine Art Center—takes traditional, domestic ceramic archetypes like containers and arches, and aggressively manipulates them.
The result? Pieces that feel like the physical embodiment of social awkwardness. His sculptures are designed to give the viewer a strange, slightly uneasy sense of connection—mimicking the precise feeling of being on the outside of an inside joke. He leans heavily on unorthodox firing processes (Raku, soda, salt), text, and unusual materials to confront the clunkiness of coming to terms with the past.
Many of these pieces have never been seen by the public before, including Kumquat SQUAT, a heavily textured, bubbling form that proudly wears its loud, spray-painted title like a badge of domestic defiance.
Gabinetto Gallery: “Neighborhood Studies: Kwasi Boyd-Bouldin”
Meanwhile, in the Gabinetto Gallery, Los Angeles-based artist Kwasi Boyd-Bouldin is shifting the conversation from personal eccentricities to structural elegies.
Boyd-Bouldin has spent the last two decades operating as a deeply embedded urban preservationist with a camera lens. After moving from Brooklyn to LA by train in 1980, he grew up watching Hollywood, Mid-City, and Koreatown shift beneath his feet. Named by Time Magazine as one of the "12 African American Photographers to Follow" in 2017, his lifelong mission has been to build a ground-level photographic archive of a changing city.
Deconstructing the Concrete
For Neighborhood Studies, Boyd-Bouldin has taken a sharp, tactile turn away from pure documentary photography. He has stepped into the role of a collage artist, physically deconstructing his massive 20-year photographic archive to slice up, layer, and rebuild scenes of Los Angeles.
By treating his own photos as raw material, he creates abstract collages that map out the devastating, complex networks of displacement, gentrification, and lost structures.
How to Attend
The Werk Gallery and Object Lab was dreamt up three years ago by founders Fritz and Matthew Faulhaber out of a pure, unadulterated passion for collecting. It effectively functions as a high-concept, locally-focused art venue paired with what they confidently call "the world's greatest gift shop" (where you can snag attainable prints and merchandise from the exhibiting artists).
The twin exhibitions kick off with an Opening Reception on Friday, July 3, 2026, from 5:00 PM to 9:00 PM. If you want to dive deeper into the mechanics of papier collé and altered clay, mark your calendar for the Artist Talks on Sunday, July 26, at 3:00 PM.
- Location: 2210 1st Ave S, St. Petersburg, FL 33712
- Gallery Hours: Wednesday & Sunday (12:00 PM – 5:00 PM), Thursday – Saturday (12:00 PM – 7:00 PM)
- Curatorial Contact: Nathan Beard (720-208-6020 / nathanbeard.curatorial@gmail.com)
- Digital:thewerk.gallery/ @thewerkgallery