Review

"No One Comes Here Anymore", Oil on Panel.

Kendra Bulgrin
Want & Fear

1-5 p.m.

Kaw Valley Arts and Humanities
756 Armstrong
Kansas City, KS
913.371.0024

Hours: 1-5 p.m. Tuesday-Friday (call for appointment)
Runs through: Aug. 8.

Artist's site: http://www.kendrabulgrin.com
Gallery site: http://www.kvah.org

Kendra Bulgrin's art wrestles with a tough question: What happens when you find what you're looking for ... and it's not enough?

Bulgrin's quest -- for a past, for the people who gave her birth, for a sense of her true self -- produced no tidy closure. It did, however, lead her to create a series of surreal, haunting, and sadly sweet paintings blending life-size farm landscapes and machinery with miniatures from a toy set Bulgrin owned as a child.

Her work is more than effective even without the backstory. Knowing what drives her images, though, brings Want & Fear -- Bulgrin's show at Kaw Valley Arts & Humanities -- into sharp emotional focus.

My oil paintings examine the longing for identity and the subsequent expectations associated with identity and memory, she writes. I question how identity is constructed through family, animals, home and memory.

My interest in identity and memory stems from the personal struggle to understand and cope with my identity and past as an adopted child. Growing up, I had always imagined my biological family. I developed a set of overtly idealized images. I contrived expectations of who and what they could be and kept these ideals as stand-ins for them. Finding my biological family left the conundrum of the stand-in versus the real. I found myself questioning the replacements and thus asking again, "Who am I?"

I began working with the miniature farm set from my childhood and began taking photographs, often with dramatic and intense lighting. The miniature acts as a replacement not only for the childhood ideal memory but transcends that particular moment to stand for other instances. These methods of working with the miniature and photography allowed me to distance myself, yet at the same time create an idealized nearby place for my longing.

There's something odd about that farm set, though: The miniature animals and machines are fairly detailed, but the human figures are featureless and not even the same color as real people. (The sea-green woman in No One Comes Here Anymore, shown above, is one of several stand-ins.) Bulgrin often paints these figures facing away from the viewer, deepening the sense of disconnect.

Even for those of us who knew our biological clans, Bulgrin's work raises another question: How much of what we recall of our formative years is real, and how much is either idealized -- or shut away because it can't be faced?

For all of that, Bulgrin's art is not bleak. It's infused with both wistful sweetness and sideways optimism, a sense not only of What if? and Who am I? but also of These are my lives, and even if I cannot reconcile them, I will live them as best I can.

That's a brave and worthwhile step for anyone to take, regardless of history, backstory ... or childhood stories never told.

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