Review

"The Twins," Mixed Media on Canvas.

Amy Kligman
Before Sleeping

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: July 31.

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

Ever try to catch yourself tipping over from wakefulness into sleep? It's not an easy thing to do. One moment your head is full of drowsy thoughts ... and the next, you're either dreaming or waking up.

That elusive moment is captured in Amy Kligman's Before Sleeping, now on display at the Leedy-Voulkos Art Center in the Crossoads. Her mixed-media paintings are by turns sweet and spooky, bright and disturbing, familiar and ... well, hauntingly almost so.

At the end of the day, when all of life’s humming stops, I find the thoughts at once the clearest and the most convoluted, Kligman writes. It is the fuzziness of the time right before sleeping that both allows for focus on the things that matter most, as well as the bombardment of the mundane to intermix, processing the day and life’s experiences in general into a strange condensed soup. This mental “stew” is the stuff of my paintings. They are my attempt to process this life: my own experiences, behavior I observe, the wealth of human history we all build on as members of this particular culture and civilization... and also the wallpaper, and the toothbrush, and all of those boring, inane things we fill every day with and dismiss as arbitrary yet still are so invisibly consumed by.

The end result blends several common themes — children, balloons, rainbows and flowers — with thick pools of latex, often black. (The Twins, today's featured post and the cover art for the Winter 2009 issue of Review, is a outstanding example.) It's an intriguing mix of charm and menace, reflecting the way the mind can race between contentment and worry on the threshold of sleep.

My painting process is a kind of meditation: thinking, exploring, evolving, Kligman explains. The works start with a kernel of a thought; some feeling,or instance, or archetype, and then are built out, expanded upon, until I feel the image completes a kind of mental circuit. There are some reoccurring themes: social awkwardness, groupthink, apprehensive moments of contentment. In truth, though, I don’t restrict myself to specific themes or choose a specific story to tell ahead of time. The pieces emerge, one element at a time, intuitively, and often eventually come to describe what I am feeling or musing over in ways my words just don’t articulate.

They don't have to. Kligman's work, in a language every near-dreamer understands all too well, speaks more than eloquently enough.

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