Archive for July, 2010
Beauty Preserved: Venus Auxier
While Venus Auxier’s preserved botanical art is on display during the hottest, muggiest part of the year, it still serves as an advance reminder of what we’ll be missing this winter.
CONCENTRATING ON FACES
Artist David Gant discusses his process and impetus for creating an all-portrait exhibition that’s largely focused on Crossroads Arts District personalities. The dozens of paintings are on display at the Leedy-Voulkos Art Center through August 28 and present an interesting who’s-who of our community as well as show the young painter’s growing range of styles and techniques.
FIFTH/FINAL FRIDAY CALENDAR DIGEST, JULY 2010
July has five Fridays, and Lawrence and Wichita, Kansas, are hosting exhibition openings for Final Friday. Fringe Festival in Kansas City, Missouri, is still going on, with visual arts, film, and performances, too. There are a number of great exhibitions closing today or very soon, too, so check what you don’t want to miss, and we’ll see you soon for First Friday, August 6.
Ad Astra Per Art: Molly Murphy
The works in “Greater Kansas” continue Molly Murphy’s exploration of women’s themes, particularly in her drawings, while melding that imagery with impressions of tall grass and wide-open skies — sometimes blue, sometimes stormy and sometimes both.
Energy Work : Heather Gambrell
Heather Gambrell’s paintings, on display through tomorrow at the Johnson County Central Resource Library, fairly crackle and spark with arcing light and painted heat.
ART AND MEDIA: HONG, MILLER, STRANDELL
Three artists react with color to the excesses of the information- and consumption-age in which we find ourselves in the 21st century: the paintings of Liu Hong and Grant Miller and the 3-D lenticular prints of Mary Ann Strandell offer three valid takes on the contemporary condition. Their work together can be seen at the Byron Cohen gallery through the end of July.
Box Set: David Lee Smale
David Lee Smale’s pinhole-camera photographs of friends, family and familiar locations range from the sharp to the near-ghostly, sometimes within the same image.
INTANGIBLE IN THE THROWN-AWAY
Much of Nari Ward’s “Re-Presence” explores the other-worldliness and breadth of everyday experience through large themes such as poverty and patriotism. He succeeds especially in his subtle and persistent employment of repetition in the found objects that make up his sculptures, on view at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art through August 29.
Perilous Beauty: TomTGradeczek
The works make it clear that while we humans might have occupied the land (the safe parts of it, at least), there are some spots that can’t be truly tamed. It’s a needful reminder … and through Gradeczek’s lens, a beautiful warning.
Labor Days: Nicholas Naughton
Nicholas Naughton’s prints offer no easy solutions … only the hard work of understanding our own connections to those whose labor sustains us.
Not Your Grandfather’s Wooden Horse : Rachel Wilson
Rachel Wilson’s horse sculpture, on display at the Overland Park Arboretum and Botanical Gardens, is possessed of a flowing, muscular grace. It’s clearly the product of someone who knows horses and the material she uses to depict them.
PRICING THE ‘COOL’
Wonder Fair gallery in Lawrence takes on the seemingly-arbitrary system of art market pricing with “Hott Sheets.” Deconstructing the façade of expertise by applying a tongue-in-cheek Value Assessment Methodology Form to 94 works on view through July 25, curators aim to determine the value of value-making in the art world.
Twisted Fun: Danielle Yakle
There’s a certain macabre fun to Danielle Yakle’s organic constructions. And, as with all abstractions and semi-abstractions, those with a penchant for allusion and hidden imagery will have a field day.
SHORT NOTICE — FRINGE FEST FILMS
IFC films start screening July 27, during KC Fringe Festival 2010: Since the time of their humble beginnings, the Independent Filmmakers Coalition of Kansas City members have made nearly 2,400 short films and more than 25 feature films — which have screened at their “homebase,” Westport Coffee House, as well as at regional, national, and international film festivals. See a great selection of them Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday (July 27-29 and 31).
Taking the Long, Deep and Wide View: John Harter
Harter’s show of drawings and prints opening tonight at VALA Gallery in Mission, is full of imagery covering not only wide physical ranges, but also the inner vastness of ideas and the eons-long arc of time.
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