RIVER MARKET REGIONAL EXHIBITION
Kansas City Artists Coalition
July 11 — August 15, 2008
© Kansas City Artists Coalition 2008
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As a fellow (and nearly lifelong) Midwesterner, I've always felt it critical not only to have a strong sense of "pride of place," but to also have an equally acute understanding of the broader world of art beyond and where and how the Midwest fits into the larger scheme of things. It is perhaps one of the most interesting challenges that our region faces in having such an energetic and diverse cultural identity while seeming simultaneously so detached from and to the international community. This situation inspires my approach to curatorial practice at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, presenting the most sophisticated and rigorous conceived expressions from Chicago alongside challenging and provocative work from around the world. It has also informed the decisions that were made for the 2008 River Market Regional Exhibition. In reviewing the many works submitted, my judgment was directed by an interest in work that achieved this balance of the regional and the international--work that, in essence, is very much of its place while demonstrating a critical cosmopolitanism.
Amy Kligman's A Little Scream, for example, with its charmingly cartoonish patterned scream of the title emanating from a small female figure's mouth, exudes a universal sense of wit and humor as well as an imaginative compositional sensibility. Similarly, Joelle Ford's, Circles of Color: Series 1A and 1B, ingeniously take a familiar situation--the residual presence of paint on the inner tops of paint cans--and converts it into an engaging abstract pattern of colors through preexisting forms, twisting the mundane into something unexpected. Her works also blur the boundaries between painting and sculpture, absorbing the logic of both practices at one and the same time. James Buehler's A Zombie Familee Portrait #4, one of a series of comically macabre paintings, takes the uncanny and unsettling figures of the "living dead" from horror movies and other pop culture sources, and arranges them in that most traditional and prosaic of genres--the family portrait. In doing so, he suggests the more sinister realities that often underlie the most functional seeming domestic situations. Inga Vereshchagina's, Magic Dance I, effectively uses a stark black background to offset a dynamic swirl of patterns to present a dancing figure like one might expect to find in, say, Igor Stravinsky's famous ballet The Firebird from 1919.
Other works demonstrate the lasting impact and influence of abstract painting, which first established itself in the United States with the arrival of Abstract Expressionism in the 1940s and 1950s. Derrick Breidenthal's Transition paintings possess a gestural use of paint and color reminiscent of the "action painting" of figures such as Willem deKooning or Hans Hofmann, as well as the subtle balance of tones found in the work of Richard Diebenkorn and Helen Frankenthaler. Brett Chenoweth's paintings History's Widow and Mint Dreamt Tears, depart from Breidenthal's seemingly more "pure" abstract compositions and use a non-representational approach to suggest subjective situations, moods, or frames of mind. Joe Bussell's Survival Strategy and Red Shift isolate accumulations of various colors and textures of paint within the center of the canvas, encouraging the viewer to concentrate both on the interplay of hues and tones and the relationship between different layers and surfaces as well.
At the other end of the artistic spectrum, one finds various works created using photography--a medium that faithfully captures the world as it is, yet is frequently used by artists to render the known world strange and unfamiliar. Greg Crawford's untitled images are exemplary of this tendency in the way they transform stacks of paper into forms suggesting natural, canyon-like formations or large corporate buildings. Also evocative of this artistic approach is Greg Barth's What The? in which it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to tell whether the image documents a "real" moment in time, or whether it was, in fact, constructed. Other works in the exhibition demonstrate how artists are increasingly using photography in more documentary fashion, letting the aesthetically charged dynamic of a situation speak for itself. Alison Fonder's Hush, a photograph taken of a shrine in China that had been laid siege to during Mao's Cultural Revolution quietly suggests the aftermath of that political upheaval in its simple austerity.
Dominic Molon
Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T S
Assistance has been provided by Mallin/Gibson Family LLC, the Estelle S. and Robert A. Long Ellis Foundation, The Francis Families Foundation, Lighton Fund, the Missouri Arts Council, a state agency. and the Artists Coalition’s patrons and members.
© 2008 by the Kansas City Artists Coalition. All rights reserved.