LITTLE AFFECTIVE ADJUSTMENTS
MAY 3 - 31, 2024 | MAIN GALLERY
Little Affective Adjustments is a group exhibition featuring artists Courtney Whitaker, Stefan Schulz, and Gaylin Nicholson. This exhibition will examine the interplay of space and self. What quiet truths lie beneath their floorboards and what histories cover their walls? Their navigations through both public and private space as art installers gives them insight into hidden stories and relationships that resonate within these realms. This exhibition excavates these narratives and how they have altered the spaces into which they have been imbued.
COURTNEY WHITAKER
Courtney is an artist living in Kansas City with a BFA in Painting from the Kansas City Art Institute and is currently the project manager for ARTworks of Kansas City Fine Art Services. With an inclination towards process-based work, she has explored many different mediums and methods of expression. Often toeing the line between abstraction and representational bodies of work, she is concerned with personal communications forged through material exploration and one’s connection to private spaces. Working in gouache and watercolor, Courtney’s most recent work has begun to examine her domestic environments and how they can be a projection of one’s mood or emotional state. As she continues to explore this means of expression, Courtney hopes to speak to the overwhelming aspects of life and the comfort we seek as a response.
Artist Statement
Over the years much of my energy has been spent setting up parameters for how I assume I am supposed to live my life. A natural habit informed by my environment, my social experience, and my mental health. In social settings, boundaries are a way we maintain our identity and protect ourselves. I’m interested instead in the boundaries we place on ourselves. Like personal expectations of who we are and who we are trying to be, expectations of how we act around others, how much work we are supposed to put into maintaining our living space, or the thoughts we allow ourselves to have. We all live with a set of self-imposed rules, and that boundary can feel like a refuge or it can feel like a container.
In looking at the work, my hope is that the viewer can feel the tension I am trying to portray through the tight crop of the picture plane and the abstraction of space that it creates. I’m interested in the compression of the image that happens through this and how this can parallel a compression of oneself. In some of the pieces, I also hope to convey a sense of calm and reflection. This is expressed mostly through my choice of color palette. Overall, my intention for this new series of paintings is to give myself a space to explore how this concept relates to my own life.
STEFAN SCHULZ
Stefan Schulz is a Kansas City based visual artist focusing on figurative painting and drawing. His works involve complex compositions of multiple figures and still life elements within warped spatial perspectives, all relying on a stylized form of observational painting and drawing. Often with dramatic lighting, gestures and props, Stefan applies a theatrical grandeur to scenes that are grounded in domestic or mundane interiors to replicate the daydreaming and escapism that people go through in their daily labors and lives. Stefan is a KCAI Painting graduate and current art handler, who has shown at PLUG, H&R Block Artspace, United Colors, and Kiosk Gallery since graduating.
Artist Statement
The merger of physical and imagined space is the main phenomenon in my work. In a sometimes surreal sense, I like to join figures and gestures that portray fantastic tropes and daydreams together in interiors or environments that are rendered in the language of observational drawing.
This body of work is an exploration of imagination, both as a tool for escaping one’s circumstance as well as accepting it. The escapism is portrayed by dramatic costumes, such as that of a western sheriff, or fantasy knight in armor. My intention with using these tropes is to show how people adopt a character to infuse their labors with more purpose, or to feel that they are on a more grand quest than their current circumstances imply. In the same breath, though, people can use imagined roles as a means of making peace with their circumstances. An example would be imagining oneself as a stoic warrior, willing to endure the denial of pleasure or relief, despite what they may really want. I think that there is often a friction and oscillation between acceptance and the desire to change and I hope the ambiguity of symbolism in my work gives this experience.
The imaginary or “invented” phenomenon in the work is contrasted by a realism that comes from observational drawing and mundane interior space. All these scenes take place within, either old and run down domestic interiors, or utilitarian places of labor, and I try to depict them with a messy sense of realism. The hope is to imply that the imagined world is always at play within people’s heads, and that even humble, shared physical space may be the stage upon which multiple mental interiors are mingling. I also have a strong faith in depicting what I have a personal connection to, be it a gesture, prop or location, and I strive to utilize them in my work with reverence to their function in my own day to day life.
I have found hope and heartache in the use of imagination. When my circumstances or financial means have kept me from the freedoms of expression and agency I’ve longed for, I have been able to lean on my artistic practice to create unique visions of my desire and emotion that quiet my dismay. However, I have also struggled with a recurrent longing for change and redefinition, and it has caused me to be dissatisfied with much of my life. This body of work is my attempt to show the bounding between creation and dissolution, assertion and response, real and imagined experience, and the various shades between these states.
GAYLIN NICHOLSON
Gaylin Nicholson is an artist living and working in Kansas City, KS. Deeply fascinated by storytelling and memory, his work explores the fluctuating nature of personal history and how our domestic environments shape these memories. His history in scenic design and construction lends to his obsession with architecture, residence, and materials. He has worked for the Fine Arts and Design Studios at JCCC for the past two years, as well as an art handling contractor. His work has been shown in the Kansas City Artist Coalition, Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art, United Colors Shipping Container, Salina Arts Center, and Tomahawk Ridge Community Center.
Artist Statement
My work explores the innate connection we have to the spaces we inhabit through distorting and re-contextualizing familiar and intimate spaces with new materials, forms and environments. I draw heavily on memories of my childhood and the modest upbringing I come from. Reminiscing on elements of my past that felt so insignificant, I seek to extract what secrets, stories, and lessons that I missed when I was there. In pursuit of the tales imbued into the spaces around us, my practice honors the labor of those who devoted themselves to the creation of these spaces that fuel my obsession. My work asks us to consider what hides in the walls around us, how they affect and change us, and what role we play in changing these spaces? To understand our own views on the world, to see our own truths, we must deconstruct the environments around us--be it, physical, psychological, or the emotional--that shape our perceptions and craft our identity.
The works in this exhibition inspect the distortion and fragmentation of memory and myth through the examination of labor and material. Using architectural languages, my work exalts common and often underappreciated materials--timber, salt, concrete, wallpaper--by placing them in the context of traditionally valued media, such as bronze or ceramics. Utilizing figuration and scale, these pieces seek to establish connection between the body and its surroundings by acknowledging the corporeality and vitality within these spaces and materials. The constructs of this exhibition reference the spaces of my childhood; having witnessed all of my struggles, my failures, my growth, these walls are characters that carry my story below their surface. It is through tender excavation and delicate deconstruction that these works pursue hidden truths concealed within the viscera of these gentle giants that have sheltered us through life.
Courtney Whitaker
Stefan Schulz
Gaylin Nicholson