Review

"Monument to Jack Kilby."

Matt Kirby

The Legends at Village West
1843 Village West Parkway
Kansas City, KS
913.788.3700

Permanent Installations.

Artist's site: http://www.mattkirby.com
Village West site: http://www.legendsshopping.com

Today, ARTKC365 recognizes not only the considerable skill of sculptor Matt Kirby, but also the innovations of a man who made this site (and everything else people do with and experience through computers) possible.

Monument to Jack Kilby, pictured above, is one of a trio of works by Kirby at The Legends at Village West, part of a development that has transformed the physical and economic landscape of Wyandotte County.

Kilby, an inventor of the microchip winner of the 2000 Nobel Prize in physics, is depicted etched into the glass surface of an oversized integrated circuit. The effect is both organic and cybernetic ... fitting, really, in that Kirby made it possible for the computer generation to live its parents' science fiction.

That spirit of innovation is one factor driving Kirby's art. It shows not only in the Kilby piece, but also in Kirby's Tombaugh Telescope. That sculpture represents a tribute to Clyde Tombaugh, discoverer of Pluto (and numerous other celestial objects) ... and a Kansan to boot (although he was born in Illinois).

One of my aims in making art is to capture certain essences of human experience and objective reality, Kirby writes. Objective facts contain a kind of incontrovertible magic. If you break a hologram into thousands of pieces, every piece contains the whole picture, in a simplified form. One could make the analogy that all artists are making individual pieces of one hologram, or one picture of what it means to be a conscious being. I see myself as part of a continuum of human activity which defines the nature of human activity. Archaeologists often unearth religious objects that are considered works of art with an intrinsic value beyond an attributed value. Their intrinsic value comes from the application of intention.

That brings us to the third sculpture at the Legends, Sound Board. It's made up of a collection of giant tuning forks — which, of course, are designed as aural rather than visual devices. Arranged as they are in this piece, though, they take on the appearance of trees in a forest (or, perhaps, cacti in the desert).

Innovation, discovery, resonance ... and art that celebrates all three. Who'd  have though you could get all that at a shopping center?

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