Carla Poindexter Looks to the Skies Inside Her Mind
Soft Water Gallery is pleased to present Aloft — The Flying Fancies of Carla Poindexter from October 10 – December 6, 2026. Springing directly from her subconscious mind, Poindexter’s highly-imaginative work has a playful, almost childlike aesthetic, though at times the play comes with a slightly sharpened edge. The works in Aloft unite pieces from two ongoing series: Flying Machines and Space Junk. From diminutive charcoal and watercolor sketches pulled from an 8 x 10 drawing tablet to statement-sized acrylic-on-canvas paintings, Poindexter fills her surfaces with activity. Objects both imagined and to-varying-degrees familiar zip hither and yon, ostensibly inhabiting the airspace above our heads. The palette varies from cheery pastel hues to impenetrable backgrounds that more readily conjure the realm beyond Earth’s atmosphere. The Atomic Color Wheel of Our Youth is a happy, quirky painting of impressive scale. The six-foot-square canvas is a joyful jumble of cavorting flattened shapes, possibly on the lam from a Cartoon Network planning session. The slightly-smalller If You Think About it, An Enfant Terrible Might Unscramble Your 86 Billion Neurons is more mysterious, with layer upon layer of “space junk” receding into a darkened abyss.
An active studio artist with more than 40 years of professional experience in painting, drawing, and experimental media, Poindexter is also a tenured professor of art at the University of Central Florida, where she has instructed all levels of undergraduate and graduate-level painting and studio arts since 2000. Her creative interests also extend into film, printmaking, and photography. She created and directed the visual imagery for Carnival Daring-Do “Featuring the Floating Apparitions,” a nine-minute animated short film constructed entirely from the characters and environments of her two-dimensional works. The film achieved official selection in over twenty national and international competitive festivals.
Poindexter received her BFA from the University of Texas in 1979 and her MFA from Texas Tech University in 1999. She completed three years post baccalaureat studies, one in painting at the University of Houston in 1981, and two years in art history and experimental ceramics at the Alfred C. Glassell School of Art, Houston, in 1983-84. She has participated in over one hundred fifty local, regional, and national exhibitions, including two dozen solo exhibitions.
Of her paintings and drawings Poindexter states, “I am constructing a synthetic world of characters and signs interacting in fields of micro and macro space that is both private and collective. I am engaged in a discovery of how space and form parallel human thought and emotion — how we continuously endeavor to understand and respond to science and poetry, language and movement, time and space, and all manner of enigmatic human causes and effects.”
Exhibition Title: Aloft — The Flying Fancies of Carla Poindexter
Location: Soft Water Gallery, 515 22nd Street South, St Petersburg, FL 33712
Contact: Lisa Lippincott lisa@softwatergallery.com
Dates/Times: Opening Reception: Saturday, October 10 from 4:00 – 6:00
Artist Talk:Saturday, October 10, from 3:30 – 4:00 pm
Exhibition Dates: October 10 – December 6, 2026
Gallery Hours: Wednesday – Saturday noon – 6:00 pm Sunday noon – 4:00 pm
