25TH ANNUAL UNDERGRADUATE COLLEGE STUDENT EXHIBITION
APRIL 3 - 24, 2020
JUROR – Garry Noland
Garry Noland has maintained an active studio practice since receiving a Bachelor’s Degree, History of Art, UMKC in 1978. Noland has exhibited widely around the United States. Recent examples are: John Michael Kohler Art Center (WI) and Cleve Carney Museum of Art (IL). Future exhibits occur at Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (CO) and Shockoe Artspace (VA).
Instagram: @garry.noland
JUROR – Garry Noland
“Mr. Johnson’s efforts teem with art-world names and related iconography… but what I like best about them is, again, never being quite sure how a piece came to be….despite being wonderful vortices of wordplay, personalities and connectedness, these collages begin with the unending mystery of how they were made, which still looks new”.[1]
The Mr. Johnson Smith refers to is American artist Ray Johnson (1927-1995).
Smith’s last sentence is critical: “which still looks new”. What Johnson cracks open (and Smith sees it) is a worm-hole of sorts into a particular work’s moment of creation. Materials, iconographies or subject matters give us clues, when we’re lucky, to when, how and why work is made. Mystery in the form of glitches stumbled on, intuited and/or learned from a dedicated studio practice gives the work an immediate currency long after a piece is finished or after the artist has died.
In looking at the 200 plus works in this jurying process I veered away from sentimentality. The work I selected pressed combinations of technical facility, immediacy of execution and clarity of idea together. All, or some combination of these, provided this viewer with access to the artist at their moments of creation. It’s a time machine of sorts, reducing the barrier between what the artist saw, thought, felt or remembered and me. It makes it a privilege to be alive.
Maximilian Paul’s videos exist on several levels. In Paul’s Punch, a fist comes out of the blue, socking the artist (?) right in the face. It’s an assault and its surprisingly shocking. Comically the 6 seconds of Punch’s duration lasts as long as most people spend looking at most art. Paul’s other piece, Mother of God, demonstrates technical clarity. It is transportative on a mystical level and in opposition to Punch we’ve witnessed not an assault but a healing, spiritual act.
Non-objective paintings can be better at describing “real” situations than realistic painting. In Sierra Scott’s paintings Rough and Space, background is pitted against foreground. It is symbolic of the struggle between the empowered and the powerless. Circular openings and ribbon-like bands simultaneously float between the front and back. They abut a quick and lubricated brushwork. That wrestling match echoes arty debates about the primacies of form and content. More significantly, the Cubist trope of (e)merging planes symbolizes our world’s changing contexts: real can be replaced by fake, good can be replaced by bad.
Finally, the paintings of Erich Humphres fill a lot of bills. A Deer Doesn’t Fret, This is the End and Beach with the Family are all serious paintings that don’t take themselves too seriously. Humphres’ high comedy of execution is coupled with a brand of melancholy joyfully claiming: “it’s okay to be sad”. They hover expressively and confidently between folk art and illustration saying: “it’s okay to paint like this”.
I wanted to end on a grateful and general note. I’m thankful that Marissa Starke and Jessica Rogers of Kansas City Artists Coalition offered me this opportunity. To see the work of the next generation of emerging artists is a privilege. Many of us won’t or don’t teach. That doesn’t mean we’re not part of the educational process. We instruct each other by setting an example to work when and wherever we can. In that sense, an artist my age (66) can also be an emerging artist. The challenge is still there every day to quiet that insistent muse between our ears who shouts by whispering: “Okay, that last piece was great. What’s new today?”
Finally, about Elaine Pagels. Pagels, a religious scholar, wrote The Gnostic Gospels in 1979. Pagels recounts the discovery, in 1945, of 56 ancient papyrus texts in the Egyptian desert. The papyri, known as the Nag Hammadi texts, contained 1500-year-old writings from Jesus’ followers. The writings were left out of the New Testament because they did not support the early foundational patriarchy of what became the Roman Catholic Church. One of the texts, the Gospel of Thomas, spoke to me, fundamentally not only as an artist but just someone trying to get things done:
“Jesus said, ‘If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you’ “.
It seem then, as artists, we have creativity cooked in to make the next new thing or solve some other problem. Where we get tripped up is not knowing or forgetting it.
Smith, Roberta, “When Mystery Keeps Works New,” New York Times, 15 January, 2015
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS
Victoria Aguilar / Starra Anh / Brandon Barrero / Olivia Benz / Cydney Cherepak / Sydney Clark / Monica Curiel / Cullen Curtis / Jolea Dillon / Issie Engelbert / Amy Fallat / Melissa Golberg / Liz Gomes / Amelia Greteman / Ryan Haney / Sienna Henson / Harrison Horton / Erich Humphres / Hazel Ingram / Emma Johns / Kate Knox / Isaac Lee / Yue Li / Bonnie McEachren / Madison McKinney / Andre Melchor / Kynnedy Moore / Clarie Moran / Hannah Morrison / Madeline Mullinnix / Yejung Park / Genevieve Pateidl / Jada Patterson / Maximilian Paul / Decotas Powell / Farëna Saburi / Sierra Scott / Holly Shimizu / Alyssa Sipe / Jacob Skaggs / Zandra Sneed-Dawkins / Katharine Suchan / Shelby Theis
