Pictured: 'Beach Circus' by Lori Childers. Image courtesy of the artist.

It’s another First Friday Art Walk and Sarasota’s downtown gallery scene answers the call with the opening of four new exhibitions tonight on Palm Avenue, including fresh work from Lori Childers, whose latest series of large-scale oil paintings explores the emotional potential of collective memory and shared iconography, while testing the formal rules of object painting. Entitled Vintage Play, the show opens tonight at 6pm at MARA Art Studio + Gallery.

In the 26 paintings of  Vintage Play, Childers turns Sarasota’s familiar circus imagery on its head, taking those vibrant memories of yesteryear and running them through the wringer that is her creative process, where they come out the other side buried under thick coats of oil paint that obscure and distort, like long years layered on a memory. Plastic horses and merry-go-rounds, circus trains and trained seals, pointed-top tents in orange, blue or electric green—they present as weathered and almost abstract, all blurred lines and bleeding colors, like a hazy recollection grasping for details and filling those empty spaces with emotion.

“This kind of nostalgic imagery creates a touchstone back even beyond my own history,” Childers says. “And you can feel that curve of life, going all the way back.” The overall effect is something dreamlike, as though the world were melting in the acid rain or slowly decaying like the peeling wallpaper of reality.

The exhibition also sees Childers playing with composition and form, centering her subjects on the canvas and removing the horizon line from her work entirely, visually unmooring the image and amounting to something of a two-pronged attack on the Rule of Thirds.

“I like my pieces to have this floaty, anti-gravitational feel,” Childers says. “I want them to be free.”

But they’re available for purchase at MARA Art Studio + Gallery.

Also opening tonight, painter Linda Richichi pays homage to Florida’s natural beauty in oils and pastel with Fragments of Light at Burns Gallery on Palm, while collage artist Liz Cole leads viewers on a swan dive into the deep sea of blue with a chromatic exploration entitled Shades of Blue: A Journey Through The Spectrum at Define Art Gallery and Studio. And at Palm Avenue Fine Art, a special three-day exhibition highlights the painting of EJ Paprocki, all oils on linen, atmospheric and moody.

Pictured: 'Beach Circus' by Lori Childers. Image courtesy of the artist.