Artist Luci Westphal creates visual ‘love letters’ to St. Pete

She has lived in several of the world’s major art cities, from Berlin to Brooklyn, but Luci Westphal chose St. Petersburg for her permanent home.

The affection she has for the city is reflected in her work.

A photographer and documentary filmmaker, Westphal developed (with an St. Petersburg Arts Alliance grant) a project called St. Pete Moving Still, which consists of standalone photo frames that show real time, looped videos of local nature. There’s no editing involved – her moving stills are, essentially, just nature photos that subtly and silently shift.

The word for this, although it doesn’t come up in conversation much, is biophilic – the incorporation of nature into the non-natural world (i.e. they’re nice to have in, say, an urban office).

For Creative Pinellas, she created Public Walls and In-Between Spaces, a life-sized wooden “shed” that offered viewers tranquil respite from the urban chaos and unrest depicted (through photos) on its outer walls.

German-born Westphal and her American artist husband, Scott Solary, have been St. Pete residents since 2018. They own a bungalow in Historic Kenwood. She also has a studio in the Arts Xchange, in the Warehouse Arts District.

No way does she feel like an outsider.

“I’ve never experienced anything like I have here,” Westphal says, “where it is such a strong community of art and art-adjacent people, supporters of the arts. I’ve been a filmmaker, a photographer, all these things, but I did not call myself an artist until I moved here.”

From Post-Historic St. Pete.

Her latest project, created with a grant from the Gobioff Foundation, is Post-Historic St. Pete. She refers to it as “a love letter to the city.” The show opens this week at two Central Avenue locations – Craftsman House Gallery (reception at 6 p.m. Thursday) and at the Forever Florida real estate agency (reception at 5 p.m. Saturday, during the St. Petersburg Arts Alliance’s Second Saturday ArtWalk).

This ambitious creative undertaking consists of photographs chemically transferred onto found construction materials (wood, metal, glass and concrete); the glass is in the form of salvaged windows from demolished structures.

The photos depict remaining “old St. Pete” buildings in the shadow of nearby high-rises and other recent construction sites.

Certain construction site images have been transferred to discarded wood from the same site. This, Westphal says, is a statement about sustainability.

As with most art, she emphasizes, the deep determination of “meaning” ultimately falls to the viewer. “I don’t think an artist is neutral,” she admits. “And a documentary filmmaker isn’t truly neutral. Because you edit when you point your camera at something – which way you’re going to show it.

From Post-Historic St. Pete.

“So the statement of the show is ‘This is what’s happening,’ but I’m choosing how I’m showing it. I prefer, at this point, to not be as didactic in showing my work as my instincts are: I’d like to capture, and show, and tell, and I’m trying to really pull back on the tell.

“I want people to see my work and draw their own conclusions from it, without me going ‘Well, this is what I think is wrong.’ But I certainly have my opinions.”

Since connectivity is another theme of Post-Historic St. Pete, “I suddenly had this idea that I wanted to have it in two different galleries. And connected. But how would that work?”

Forever Florida dedicates several walls to local art exhibits. And Craftsman House, is of course, a dedicated gallery and showcase. Three blocks separate them. “I walked back and forth, and I looked through the windows,” Westphal explains. “And now it looks right – it (the art) is about urban development, about the juxtaposition between the new and the old. And I thought ‘Duh, this is how I want the exhibit to be. I want people to experience St. Pete. I want them to be in the city; I don’t want then to just look at my photos.”

Forever Florida, she points out, “is all clean lines and pristine white. And sleek. And the Craftsman House is more whimsical – completely the opposite. And it worked perfectly.”

She intends to “hide” concrete-transferred art along the three-block walk, to create a through line.

A native of Hamburg, Germany, Westphal arrived in the United States 30 years ago. She met her future husband while attending documentary school at the University of Florida in Gainesville; next came film school at Florida State University in Tallahassee. They moved between projects in New York City and in Germany, and spent seven years in Fort Collins, Colorado; Westphal created a series of 60-second videos called Moving Postcards.

 “The reason I wanted to live in the U.S.,” she says, “was the freedom I felt, being able to live life as a creative person, an opinionated person, as a curious person. I love Germany, it’s still my home, I’m still a German citizen, but it felt a lot more restrictive. This was back when I was in my 20s.

“In America I can live in New York, as I did, and in Colorado, as I did, and now I’m living in St. Pete. And around me are people from all over the place, too, and that I loved about New York. And I loved about Gainesville in the ‘90s, how everybody seemed to be an artist, everybody was a musician, everybody had tattoos, everybody had colored hair. It was just very, very liberated.”

Westphal also works as an adjunct with John Hopkins Middle School’s magnet art program.

Home, as the poets say, is where the art is. “The life that we have right now, we’re in a beautiful, beautiful place. My dream is to have an apartment in New York for the summers.

“My parents are in Germany, so I always go home usually for six or seven weeks in the summer. And get out of the Florida heat, and spend time with them and friends.”

To learn more about the artist, and about Post-Historic St. Pete, visit her website.