St. Pete, FL

FloridaRAMA Project

The Vermin Bar & Grill, Sculpture, painting, wood working, photography, videography

Jonathan Schork’s diorama depicts a dive bar & grill inhabited by pest insects native to Florida, with special attention to the details of its location. Jonathan explains, “the insects are not intended to be biologically accurate representations, but more metaphors for the way they afflict us. Equally significant is the underlying theme, a metaphor for the vices that infest our state: gambling, smoking, drinking, gluttony. Many of the details will be lost in a cursory viewing, the tiny green olive in the tiny Martini glass, the celery stalk in the Bloody Mary, the distinctive native materials used to build out the creatures and furnishings, but the whole point of immersion really is to surround the viewer with nuances that all contribute, even if invisibly, to the experience of the visit…”

Bio—
Born and raised in NY’s Catskill Mountains, Jonathan Schork came Tampa Bay via a long excursion in a solar house in the Florida Keys. Co-founder of The Schork-Munsell Studios in 1998 with their late wife, Mary Cooke Hoeft, Schork has experience not only with their work in studios, both private and public, but also as a gallery owner/operator and a producer of public expositions. Though their stray cat deceased in February of 2020, Schork continues to share their quirky house with their mum and a stray girl. “Vermin” is their first project for FloridaRAMA's experience.