Yes I Kansas
When you tell people
you are moving from Chicago to Kansas, they give you an askance look and
shrug their shoulders. When you tell people you are an artist moving from
Chicago to Kansas, they give you a look as if you just wrote a suicide
note. Kansas has a reputation; an authentic, true-blue, salt-of-the-earth,
plainspoken, unvarnished reputation. A reputation that doesn't leave much
room for the intellectual, liberal-minded, contemporary artist. It is
the heart of the heartland; as far as you can get, in distance, politics,
and art discourse, from either of the coasts. In a national survey it
ranked number one in wheat production, and dead last in tourism. Needless
to say when I made this move one year ago my artistic future seemed shaky
at best.
"Yes I Kansas" is a positive affirmation against these common
preconceived notions. Kansas is more than the landlocked, weather-beaten
geographical center of our country. "Yes I Kansas" has to do
with what I have found here; rich history, forward thinking politics,
and art; good art, art that stops me in my tracks. I have found pockets
of artists making, showing, and talking about art locally and internationally;
as well as international artists showing work here ( I have seen work
by Dave Shrigley and Jenny Holtzer). "Yes I Kansas" has to do
with my personal revelation that, moving here is not artistic suicide,
that this is a land full of potential, and there are people making things
happen.
"Yes I Kansas" features the work of six artists at varying stages
of their career; some fresh out of school, others proving themselves on
the national art scene for quite some time. All the artists, directly
or indirectly, address Kansas' history, geography, and politics; as well
as the psychological impacts of living and working as an artist here.
They have successfully taken on the vast middle ground between the pulsating
poles of east and west with resounding confidence and determination. They
have risen above the painfully flat averageness and inspired the proclamation
"Yes I Kansas".
Alaska Noyes
July 25, 2007
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| Skull |
Trashy | Tiger |
Aaron Storck grew
up in New York City on the upper west side. He frequently visited
the Metropolitan Museum of Art. After graduating from the Bronx
High School of Science he left the city to attend the University of Kansas
in Lawrence KS. There he earned a BFA in Printmaking in 2001 and
has since divided his time between the two places. Kansas is a place
of many family ties for Aaron and he loves Kansas as he loves New York.
He is currently working in multi media.
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| Berlioz |
Hospital |
Alexander Kvares
was born in the Ukraine and studied printmaking at the University of Kansas.
He creates intricate, tightly rendered drawings full of decadence and
decay. These intuitive works are the result of Kvares’ own experiences
of a dichotomous culture. A culture of consumption and regurgitation:
simultaneously innocent and jaded; vulgar and gentle; beautiful and grotesque.
Kvares currently lives in Atlanta where he, in addition to his solo artistic
endeavors, is part of the art collective Golden Blizzard. GB’s eight
members work in direct collaboration on projects ranging from drawing
to installation and performance. GB’s thematic interests range from
post-ironic interpretation of pop-cultural, utopian and retro-futurist
images to examination of curatorial practices and art world hierarchy.
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| I Am The
Shit |
Erect | Art Is Workmanship |
Paint is the
medium I use to create works that comment on varying levels about society,
art, politics and often all three. I am fascinated by language and text,
always attempting to marry these fascinations pictorially. In my work
I create formally beautiful words that, with and beyond the literal reading,
reveal deeper concerns. In recent years, I have experienced an evolution
from image paired with text to text alone. This has opened multiple routes
of investigation for myself as well as the viewer. Presently, due to a
large studio and other opportunities, the scale of my work has increased
dramatically. These factors have also caused the work to erupt dimensionally
as sculpture. Other processes in my work have stayed virtually unchanged
throughout my career. I believe craft is important in art, knowing that
it can appear in many forms. My work is conversant with craft from concept
to execu tion. It is informed by an aesthetic that is at once tight yet
painterly. My artistic goals remain constant. They are: challenge art,
encompass a world view, be current, expand viewer ship and remain open
formally and otherwise. I am interested in literalism and the idea of
a conceptual subtext that is generated by the viewer. Ultimately, with
this knowledge, I hope to make works that are at once formally and politically
challenging; works in which the viewers’ subtext intertwines to
complete the piece.
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Born: May 12,
1980, St. Cloud, MN
Christa spent her formative years dreaming of becoming a singing telegram
or a performer in the circus. Currently residing in Lawrence, Kansas (aka
10+ hours from everywhere), she attends the University of Kansas. Always
considered somewhat of a collector, she spends her free-time rummaging
local thrift shops and dumpsters for taxidermy, paint by numbers, and
whatever else suits her fancy.
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| 100 Portraits
Drawn From Thirty Minute Life Sketches (detail) |
100 Portraits Of My Girlfriend | 100 portraits drawn from thirty minute life sketches |
Matt Wycoff was
born in Anderson, South Carolina in 1980 and currently lives and works
in Brooklyn, New York. He is a 2002 graduate of the Kansas City Art Institute
Sculpture Department. Wycoff is an artist, writer and freelance journalist.
He has been an artist in residence at the Urban Culture Project Studio
Residency, (Jan. 04 - Mar. 05) in Kansas City, Missouri and the Bemis
Center for Contemporary Art, (Feb. 07 - Apr. 07) in Omaha, Nebraska. He
is included in The Drawing Center slide registry and the White Columns
curated artist's registry, both in New York, New York. He has exhibited
his work in both solo and group exhibitions in venues such as the Leedy-Volkous
Art Center (Kansas City, MO), Dolphin Gallery (Kansas City, MO), and RARE
Gallery (New York, NY). Wycoff's work has been reviewed in numerous publications,
including The Kansas City Star, The Pitch, Art Papers and Review.
Wycoff's current body of work is an on-going series of conceptual projects
that filter a wide array of subjects and themes through his own personal
experiences or through simple, sometimes exhaustive, processes in which
his activity accumulates multiple possible meanings through repetition.
Wycoff strips down romantic, historically, or emotionally charged content
into often reductive visual elements that create a tension between actual
human emotions and situations, and the various ways we represent and understand
those experiences.
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| Jennison |
Danites | Lane |