16 Jan 2009 to 12 Feb 2009
Hours: Thursday & Saturday, 12-5 pm
Opening THIRD FRIDAY, JANUARY 16, 6-9 pm
Urban Culture Project at PARAGRAPH
23 E 12TH STREET
MO 64108
Kansas City, MO
Missouri
North America
p: 1 816 221 5115
m:
f:
w: www.urbancultureproject.org
Free Will: image and linear sequence Featuring work by Cortney Andrews, Adam Cruces and Martin Murphy Curated by Jared Panick
Opening THIRD FRIDAY, JANUARY 16, 6-9 pm Paragraph gallery, 23 East 12th St., KCMO
January 16-February 12, 2009; Hours Thursday + Saturday, 12-5p
Non-linear narrative has long been an artistic technique utilized to mimic the structure and recall of human memory, as exemplified in Homer’s Iliad and more contemporarily in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive and other works. The impetus of employing non-linearity as an artistic device is that its un-structure provides a more empirical view of how humans, individually and collectively, construct narratives and experience time. Engaging ideas of temporality and free will, this approach provokes viewers to assess their own start and end.
The works featured in Free Will employ non-linear approaches to the conveyance of time, place, and narrative -- such as disjunctive plot structures, spliced images, and sequential manipulations – in order to evoke and invoke the complex manner in which humans process and attempt to make sense of the world around us.
This exhibition features the work of three emerging media artists currently working in New York, all three of whom graduated from Kansas City Art Institute and remain connected to the arts community in Kansas City.
The self-portrait photographs of Cortney Andrews hinge upon trauma and eroticism. By beginning her narrative in media fashion, the images immediately thrust the viewer into Andrews’ world of feminine intimacy and struggle. The artist’s photographs allude to cinematic vignettes of a larger traumatic and/or intimate narrative. About the work, Andrews writes, “The staging of emotional events allows the viewer to witness the female subject actively engaging with her own internal struggles. By taking on and projecting an alter ego, the artist is able to become a participant in and spectator of this reenactment.” The viewer’s task is to piece together these stagings, projecting their own personal histories into and onto these images in attempt to infill the in-between as well as the before and after.
The flatworks of Adam Cruces are, quite literally, experiments with image and linear sequence. In the past, Cruces has created photographic collages of American arts institutions such as the Nelson-Atkins Museum, MoMA, The Getty Museum, and Dia:Beacon. In these works, as well as newer pieces featured in Free Will, Cruces’ seemingly simple reconfigurations of architecture and location ring true to the complicated way individuals visualize memory as a series of partial, fragmented experiences. Whether considering the experience of walking down a city street or perusing museums’ massive collections of artwork, Cruces’ images compound singular aspects of experience and time into masses of spliced documentation– inside and out, night and day. The elements within the images on view are taken out of sequence and have been re-contextualized to create a new image in each case. By doing this, memory and experience, the specific and the general, are collapsed into new, composite wholes.
The details within an expanse of information and the art of editing are ongoing interests Cruces pursues through his artwork. In his video work, a seamless flow from beginning to end and back again offer the viewer means to determine their own sense of start and finish.
Although logical analysis is useful in our daily lives, it is often at odds with the manner in which we actually construct narratives and experience time. Leaving linear sequencing behind, Martin Murphy’s work, including video, sculpture, and a fusion of the two, investigates scenarios in which logic breaks down; places where waking consciousness is suspended. Murphy creates a polysemic experience in which visual and temporal relationships progressively lapse, whereby the viewer is challenged to willfully choose where to locate themself in relation to the structure of the work.
About the artists: Cortney Andrews received her BFA from the Photo/New Media department at the Kansas City Art Institute, and her MFA in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design. She currently lives and works in New York City, and is the Assistant Director of Plane Space in South Chelsea.
Adam Cruces was born in Houston, TX and received his BFA in 2008 from the Interdisciplinary program at the Kansas City Art Institute. Cruces has presented solo exhibitions of his work at the Open Lot in St. Louis, MO and San Jacinto Community College in Houston, TX. He has also exhibited in numerous group exhibitions such as Wide Open at the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois-Champaign, as well as international exhibitions in Romania, Finland and Portugal. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Martin Murphy was born in Eau Claire, Wisconsin in 1982. He relocated to Kansas City in 2001 where he received his BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute's Interdisciplinary program. Murphy currently lives and works in New York City and is an MFA candidate at Hunter College. His work has been shown at the Society for Contemporary Photography (Kansas City, MO), Art In General (NYC), the Chashama Gallery in Times Square (NYC). Martin's work was most recently shown in the 2008 Scope Art Fair (Miami, FL).
About the curator: Jared Panick is a Kansas City-native, artist, arts administrator and curator. He studied Printmaking at the Kansas City Art Institute, and has exhibited at the H&R Block Artspace at the Kansas City Art Institute, the UCP Bank gallery, the Dolphin windows, and the Bakery in Kansas City, MO. Panick has been a contributing writer for Review magazine, and has curated exhibitions for the Urban Culture Project, Chameleon Arts & Youth Development, the Bakery and the Old Midwest Hotel. He is currently Programs Manager, Charlotte Street Foundation.
An initiative of the Charlotte Street Foundation, Urban Culture Project creates new opportunities for artists of all disciplines and contributes to urban revitalization by transforming spaces in downtown Kansas City into new venues for multi-disciplinary contemporary arts programming. For more information, visit charlottestreet.org and urbancultureproject.org or e-mail info @ charlottestreet.org.
