Review

"Music-Salsa," Digital Graphic.

Alexis Hejna
Music as Abstract Thought
and
Songs to Pictures

By appointment during business hours.

Kaw Valley Arts & Humanities
756 Armstrong
Kansas City, Kansas
913.371.0024

Hours after Second Friday: Tuesday-Friday, by appointment during business hours.
Runs Through: July 2.

Gallery site: http://www.kvarts.org

Occasionally, this space will include specific musical suggestions to go along with the day's art.

Today, feel free to pick your own. Alexis Hejna's music-themed graphic art covers so much ground that it would be hard to go wrong with anything.

Bach, Brubeck, Blue Öyster Cult — it's all good. (But if you want to gravitate toward the Beatles, that might be even better. More on that later.)

The Music as Abstract Thought series, roughly half of Hejna's show at Kaw Valley Arts and Humanities, is made up of her visual impressions of various genres — everything from classical, blues and jazz to funk, punk and psychedelia.

Music was a crucial part of growing up in my family, she writes. Dad played multiple instruments, (including bass, guitar, percussion, piano, harmonica, and the occasional flute, mandolin, and banjo), while Mom has vocal talent to spare, singing the National Anthem for Royals, Chiefs, and Blades games. While I didn’t quite get the musical gene my parents have (I’m what most people consider tone-deaf), music became an instrumental part of my life (yes, pun intended). To me, there are few things in this world that bind us like music, and that’s what I wanted to represent in my collection.

Hejna's visual takes on the styles represented in Music as Abstract Thought range from the cerebral to the visceral. Music — Salsa, today's featured image, falls squarely into the latter category.

"Salsa music is so sensual, so sexy," Hejna explained at her Second Friday opening reception. "I pictured the guitar as being unable to take it. The music is just too much. The guitar is coming apart under the sheer sexiness of the music it's playing."

The other series in this show, Songs to Pictures, recreates Hejna's impressions of individual songs' lyrics — this time using models, often her friends, placed into digitally altered surroundings.

I felt a song cannot be fully explained, she writes, without an actual person there to help it along.

Hejna references Johnny Cash, the Rolling Stones ... but most often, she taps into the Beatles' catalog for inspiration.

"The Beatles are my favorites," she says. "No matter what mood you're in, what you need at the time, there's a Beatles song for it."

And, she adds, there is still plenty of music out there — by the Fab Four and countless other artists — that inspires her.

I don’t consider these collections closed, Hejna writes; there are still dozens of music styles and hundreds of songs that I want to include.

That musical/visual path, given Hejna's eclectic tastes and stated preferences, is likely to be (pardon the obvious reference) a long and winding road.

Judging by what she has produced so far, it's also sure to be a scenic route.

-re-

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