Aberrant Art Gallery

Tucked into a storefront at 118 N. Beach Street in Daytona Beach’s Historic Riverfront District, Aberrant Art Gallery is essentially a one man operation built around the paintings and prints of artist Barry Kite. Kite relocated the gallery here in 2010 after years spent in the San Francisco Bay Area art scene, bringing a body of work that mixes classical painting references with pop culture and dark comedy. One piece described on the gallery’s own site reimagines Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring alongside a Breaking Bad style meth lab, which gives a good sense of the gallery’s sensibility: technically accomplished, a little irreverent, and not interested in taking itself too seriously.

The gallery sits directly across from the Halifax River, about a mile from the Atlantic Ocean, in a stretch of Beach Street that has become Daytona Beach’s closest thing to a gallery row. Alongside Kite’s own paintings and giclee prints, the space shows work from several other local artists, giving visitors more than one voice to take in during a stop. Because it is run day to day by the artist himself rather than a staff of gallery attendants, the feel inside is closer to visiting a working studio than a formal commercial gallery, and conversations with whoever is behind the counter often turn into conversations about the work itself.

Hours here are refreshingly, almost comically honest about the realities of running a small independent gallery. The posted hours are roughly noon to 6 p.m., but the gallery’s own description acknowledges that this can slide to 6:30, 7, or later depending on the day, or that the gallery may simply not open if something else comes up. That kind of flexibility is common among owner operated galleries in small beach towns, where a single person is handling sales, framing, shipping, and the art itself, and it is worth calling ahead before making a special trip.

Aberrant Art Gallery is best understood as part of Daytona Beach’s downtown gallery cluster rather than a standalone destination. It sits within easy walking distance of Starry Night Gallery, VJL Gallery, and the Halifax Historical Museum, all clustered along a few blocks of Beach Street, which makes it easy to fold into a longer afternoon of gallery hopping. The gallery participates in the neighborhood’s First Friday Art Walk along with its neighbors, when downtown’s galleries and shops stay open later and the sidewalks fill with people moving from storefront to storefront.

For collectors interested in original, distinctly personal work rather than mass produced decor, Aberrant offers something genuinely different from the beach town souvenir shops nearby. It is a small gallery with a strong point of view, run by the artist whose name is effectively on the door, and it rewards visitors willing to work around its informal schedule.