Review

"The Possessions", Graphite, Gold Leaf and Gesso on Paper.

Misha Kligman
WITNESS: Perspectives on War (group show)

11 a.m.-5 p.m.

Leedy-Voulkos Art Center
2012 Baltimore
Kansas City, MO
816.474.1919

Hours: 11 a.m.-5 p.m., Wednesday-Saturday
Runs through: Feb. 5.

Artist's site: http://www.mishakligman.com
Gallery site: http://www.leedy-voulkos.com

There's art that uplifts, art that complements, art that amuses ... and art that confronts, reminds and haunts.

Misha Kligman's work is squarely in that fourth category.

Kligman's portion of the WITNESS: Perspectives on War group show at the Leedy-Voulkos Art Center is stark, dark (in color and emotional tone) and steeped in the sort of pain and alienation that comes when people are made to be Others.

At the same time, it's a study of survival and endurance through circumstances that most of us can't even fathom. This culture has its tensions, yes, but deep-seeted ethnic and religious antagonism that lasts for centuries ... the sort that leads neighbor to slay or betray neighbor? We have no clue -- those of us who were born here, that is.

Identity fragmentation and cultural dualism are two results of the immigrant experience, Kligman writes. My work focuses on a visual representation of this. Through the lens of my family’s history and personal experience I am examining ideas of home and cultural belonging.

That's a wide focus, but Kligman has narrowed it -- and in so doing, made the work more powerful by making it more personal.

I am interested in the 20th century history of the Soviet Jewish diaspora and the residual psychological affects that the continuous ethnic repressions and the Holocaust had on the generations of Russian Jews who survived these events, he writes. I attempt to recover and piece together what remains of a lost and scattered culture, one shaped by internal values as much as by the passage of time, extermination, war, and finally assimilation.

Kligman includes three-dimensional objects (most notably a burned book) in his portion of the show, along with such unusual media as ash, salt and gold. The last of those materials figures significantly -- and poignantly -- in The Possessions, today's featured piece and perhaps the most wrenching of Kligman's works.

I aim to transform the images from mere nostalgic artifacts to containers of cultural memory, he writes. Ash could be seen as alluding to destruction as well as rebirth; salt as something that preserves; gold reinforces the ideas of permanence and preciousness. Making the work for me is a process of discovery. The process provides me with the opportunity to not only reexamine the past, but to identify my place in history, and the cultures that I inhabit.

For the rest of us, it's a reminder that history is made up of countless individual histories, and that those  cast aside -- or worse -- as Others are human, too.

And if that reminder isn't a thing of conventional loveliness, so be it. Kligman's work has its own harsh, cold beauty ... one that has nothing to do with complementing a room's decor and everything to do with matching the shadings of the soul.

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