Your Brain Needs Recess. A St. Pete Gallery Is Offering It.

Quick question: when did you last look up?

Not at your phone. Not at the weather app telling you it's 91 degrees in October, which you already knew because you have skin. Actually up, at nothing in particular, for no reason, with no plan to post about it.

If you can't remember, you're in good company. Grown-up life is engineered against wandering. Every spare second has a feed waiting to fill it, every daydream gets interrupted by a notification, and somewhere around age 12 most of us quietly agreed that staring into space was something to grow out of.

Carla Poindexter never agreed. And starting Saturday, Oct. 10, at Soft Water Gallery in St. Petersburg, she's making a pretty persuasive case that the rest of us shouldn't have either.

"Aloft — The Flying Fancies of Carla Poindexter" fills the gallery with things that drift, zip and tumble through the air: flying machines that never passed an FAA inspection, fragments of "space junk" floating through darkness, shapes that feel almost familiar and then refuse to tell you what they are. Poindexter says the work comes straight from her subconscious. Which means you're not looking at a picture of the sky. You're looking at a picture of what the sky looks like inside someone's head when nobody is making them be productive.

That is a radical thing to put on a wall in 2026.

Consider the centerpiece, The Atomic Color Wheel of Our Youth: six feet by six feet of bright, crowded, cavorting shapes that look like every Saturday-morning cartoon you ever watched broke free at once. It doesn't explain itself. It doesn't need to. You stand in front of it and something in your chest unclenches by about 10 percent, and you remember that "fun" used to be a perfectly acceptable reason to do something.

Then turn around to the painting with the best title in Tampa Bay this year: If You Think About It, An Enfant Terrible Might Unscramble Your 86 Billion Neurons. Same imagination, opposite mood. Colored debris sinking into a black void, layer after layer, like the view from somewhere you probably shouldn't be without a helmet. It's the 2 a.m. version of the cartoon morning, and it's the reason this show is more than charming. Poindexter's playfulness has teeth. Wonder and unease turn out to live in the same neighborhood.

Here's the other reason to care: Poindexter isn't a viral sensation or a celebrity import. She is the kind of artist a region either knows about or wastes. She has made work for more than 40 years, taught painting at the University of Central Florida since 2000, shown in more than 150 exhibitions, and turned her painted characters into an animated short that played more than 20 film festivals worldwide.

In other words, a serious, accomplished artist is right up the road, still making strange and joyful things, and she will be standing in a St. Pete gallery on Saturday afternoon explaining how she does it. Artist talks are the closest thing the art world has to a director's commentary track, and most people skip them. Don't.

Small galleries run on foot traffic, and openings are where a local arts scene either shows up or slowly stops existing. You can spend Saturday afternoon on the couch letting an algorithm decide what you think about. Or you can give an hour to a room full of things that ask nothing of you except attention, then stay for the reception.

Your 86 billion neurons could use the break.

"Aloft — The Flying Fancies of Carla Poindexter"
Soft Water Gallery, 515 22nd St. S., Unit F, St. Petersburg
Artist talk: Saturday, Oct. 10, 3:30–4 p.m.
Opening reception: Saturday, Oct. 10, 4–6 p.m.
On view: Through Dec. 6
Hours: Wed–Sat noon–6 p.m.; Sun noon–4 p.m.
More: softwatergallery.com