Review

"Magic Landscape Night," Screen Print.

Christina Vantzou

9 a.m.-5 p.m.

The Dolphin Gallery
1600 Liberty
Kansas City, MO
816.842.4415

Hours: 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday-Friday, Noon-5 p.m. Saturday
Runs through: Sept. 4

Artist's site: http://www.christinavantzou.com
Gallery site: http://www.thedolphingallery.com

Today's featured artist comes to you all the way from Brussels, Belgium ... where she relocated from her native Kansas City.

Christina Vantzou is an artist, a graphic designer and a musician. The first two elements come together in her show of screen prints at the Dolphin Gallery in the West Bottoms.

Vantzou's prints are by turns amusing and disturbing (sometimes within the same piece, as with her repeating motif of a stag-headed woman). Her palette is heavy on pastels and female imagery, often with the woman in seriocomic danger — or at least discomfort, as in Magic Landscape Night, today's featured work.

That said, nothing in the show feels angry or aimed at anyone or anything. If there's a philosophical point being made here, it doesn't push itself shouting to the forefront.

The emphasis is on the visual, the overall effect is strongly two-dimensional and even the strangest images feel like design elements, the sort of thing one would see on a particularly cool t-shirt. (And, lo and behold, that's what they can be. Vantzou offers a line of shirts imprinted with her work.)

They also remind of concert posters or CD cover art, tying Vantzou's illustrative and printmaking talents back to the musical aspect of her creativity. Being displayed as they are, in a large cluster in the Dolphin's northeast room, heightens the poster imagery, as though someone had papered a wall in Midtown or Lawrence with promo flyers.

So while Europe's gain is Kansas City's loss, Vantzou's ongoing ties to her hometown mitigate that somewhat ... and this show at the Dolphin offers yet more proof that this area's strain of homegrown creativity can thrive anywhere.

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