2012 Baltimore Ave I Kansas City, MO 64108 I 816.474.1919 I Thurs-Sat, 11am-5pm

First Friday Opening

August 1, 2014

6pm-9pm

Kim Eichler-Messmer

Sunrise.KS.November

hand dyed quilt

65" x 35"

Kristin Goering

Dusk

acrylic on panel

48" x 52"

Echoes of Earth & Sky

Kim Eichler-Messmer

Kristin Goering

August 1 - September 27, 2014

Main Gallery


Kim Eichler-Messmer My quilt-based work is entirely hand dyed and explores color transition and gradation as inspired by the landscape. In particular, I am interested in capturing and abstracting certain qualities of light that occur at sunrise, dusk, sunset, and during different weather events in the Midwest. My primary aim is to visually abstract the landscape while also bringing it into sharper emotional focus. Diligent photographic documentation of the sky forms the starting point for decisions about composition and color, which are then shaped by memory, mood, and personal associations with the places I am representing.		Kristin Goering Kristin Goering's paintings emphasize layers of rich color and texture. She finds interest in the wild and under-populated areas of the Midwest and hopes to build awareness of these vanishing landscapes by presenting them from a novel perspective. Through the use of stylized brushstrokes and an intensified palette she strives to move beyond typical represen-tationalism and extend the viewer's concept of what is natural.

Untitled (Poland V)

Gelatin Silver Print

Door of Perception No. 1

Gelatin Silver Print

EXITS AND ENTRIES

In the Photographs by John Gutowski

1979 - 1999

August 1 - August 30, 2014

Front Gallery

After photographer John Gutowski died unexpectedly in 2001 at the age of 53, I helped curate a retrospective of his work at the Belger Arts Center the following year. Upon spending considerable time with this inspired artist's work, it was evident there was one significant motif that flowed through Gutowski's oeuvre. No matter what the process, the subject matter, or the year the image was made, many of Gutowski's works featured one or more entryways and often windows. Whether photographing in Russia, Europe, the Middle East, or the United States, images of exits and entries, mostly unpeopled, were either the main focus or background subject in a surprising percentage of his pictures.

Gutowski was the head of the UMKC Photography Department and a master printer, excelling in processes as varied as large-scale color imagery created with the legendary 20 x 24 inch Polaroid camera, and such labor-intensive 19th century techniques as the kallitype. He was also a historian of photography, and wrote journals about his work, his travels, and his observations of other photographers' art. There is no mention in any of his writings about the subject of doors and windows. But consciously or unconsciously, for over 20 years Gutowski captured, in his myriad urbanscapes, pictures of exit ways and entries from around the world.

Cydney Millstein, Gutowski's widow, notes that one of her husband's favorite books was Doors of Perception, the controversial and influential 1954 account by Aldous Huxley about expanding the limits of consciousness through the use of mescalin. Gutowski even titled one of his most beautiful pictures, shot in Morocco, "Door of Perception #1."

"The urge to transcend self-hood," Huxley famously wrote, "is a principle appetite of the soul." Throughout history, Huxley proposed, artists from the East and the West, including such major figures as Vermeer, Rembrandt, Goya, and Van Gogh created "a kind of absolute Thing-in-Itselfhood" by composing artworks with only one or a few subjects. Artists do this, Huxley believed, because "in a work of art, the isolation of an object tends to invest it with absolute-ness, to endow it with that more-than-symbolic meaning which is identical with being."

Images of doors and windows are ripe with archetypal meanings, of course. William Blake, who penned "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell," which was the inspiration for Huxley's book, wrote "If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees things through narrow chinks of his cavern."

Most of the doors in Gutowski's pictures are resolutely closed, impenetrable, in shadow form, or far off in the distance. His windows, on the other hand, are often wide open, giving evidence of some kind of presence within. And even if humans are not present outside, vestiges of their presence are left behind, whether in the form of graffiti, tattered posters, or remnants of antique statuary.

Gutowski's photographs depict everyday, knowable things. Yet because his images of exits and entries are seen either close-up or at a great distance, or from an odd angle, they are also disquietingly strange and mysterious. There is little doubt that anyone who entered one of Gutowski's doors would not be quite the same upon exiting.

Elisabeth Kirsch, Curator, 2014

BRAVE NEW WORLD

A Print Installation by

Mark Farris

August 1 - September 27, 2014

Back Gallery

ARTIST BIO

Mark Farris was born and raised in North Carolina, where he received his MFA in 2012 from the University of North Carolina Greensboro. In 2006 Mark received a certificate in Printmaking from the Academy of Fine Arts in Wroclaw, Poland. He is currently the Assistant Professor of Printmaking at the University of Central Missouri. His work has been exhibited at numerous venues in North Carolina and the Kesting/Ray Gallery in Brooklyn, New York. This is his first solo exhibition in the Midwest.

ARTIST STATEMENT

The prints that comprise this installation reflect an amalgam of personal interests ranging from museum dioramas, Avant - Garde set design and DaDa to works of science fiction with dystopian or post apocalyptic themes to German Naturalist illustrations from the 18th - 19th century. The scope of influence these illustrations in particular have had on my work is evidenced in the overall aesthetic of the prints themselves.

Through appropriation and restructuring, I am utilizing the visual language of scientific illustration to create new "hybrid" forms that exist as a visual documentation of physical specimens. The origin of these specimens is that of a possible future, a fictitious alternate reality much like one that might be found in a work of science fiction.

From this vantage point, the prints or "specimens" are to be seen as the perverse byproduct of a world in which science and technology has gone awry, resulting in the creation of artificially engineered organisms that defy classification, possessing attributes from almost every phylum and thus greatly upsetting the ecology of our planet.

The basis for this satirical envisioning of the future stems from a deeply personal reverence for the natural world, in all of its beauty and mystery. I understand, yet will never fully comprehend the delicate inter-workings of nature, how unbelievably interconnected everything is. This understanding has manifested itself in my work, through the creation of images that can be interpreted as cautionary figures, grotesque caricatures occupying some possible future.

OMG MAIL

Charlie Mylie & Lindsey Griffith

August 1 - August 30, 2014

Opie Gallery

ARTIST STATEMENT

Making things is a way that we communicate with each other and with you. We create opportunities for personal experience with our art because the feelings that come from encountering unique things can be transformative, even in small ways. Mail from friends, chance discoveries and playing games all give us that sense that innocence and imagination are still alive, so let's celebrate! Our art is here to bring attention to some important parts of a real life: interacting with people in real time, touching images, giving gifts, receiving gifts, and being inspired to pursue what feels meaningful. It's amazing what effect simple things like cardboard, hot glue, ink, and a little bit of color can achieve. Remember when a cardboard box was ANYTHING? We are still doing that except now our fine motor skills are more developed. So please, feel young, put on a playful smirk, and help yourself to a slice of small wonder.

ARTISTS' BIOS

Get two pairs of googly eyes. Put them on your friend's butt, two to a cheek. This is Lindsey Griffith and Charlie Mylie, a pair of wackos that are starting to find buoyancy in their wild ideas. One went to art school, the other studied playwriting, but really it was all of the play betwixt then and now that brought them to making props out of cardboard and performances out of games. Lindsey is a free-lance fabricator and pinata maker, and also creates costumes and props and performs with the travelling variety show Whoop Dee Doo. Charlie is an illustrator who you may have seen drawing around town as Pop-Up Charlie, the golden wizard who can draw anything (yes it's true). Together, they work to make fun, one-of-a-kind experiences for themselves and others through art projects, performances, and parties. Presently they operate a lo-fi high-fun party biz drenched in novelty and held together with hot glue. They were recently awarded a Rocket Grant to experiment with live computer-generated puppet shows. They are super stoked. They live and work (as if there is a difference) in Kansas City - you can find them where two rivers meet.

Music Makers, 2010, mixed media

Sum Good, Sum Bad & Sum Ugly

Kristopher Clark

July 4 - August 30, 2014

Lower Level Gallery

ARTIST BIO

I was born in 1980 in Kansas City, and have been living and working in the Crossroads Art District for nearly a decade. I rediscovered my deeply rooted passion for art, my "need for art," and have not put down the wet paint brush since. I am formally untrained as an artist, but self-taught and continually growing as a young artist every day.