Lawrence Artists Michael Krueger and Mark Cowardin at Rockhurst University

Here is my latest review in the Kansas City Star of Michael Krueger and Mark Cowardin's exhibition at Rockhurst University's Greenlease Gallery.  The artists' work made a dynamic combination.

Lawrence artists offer a naturally unnatural exhibit

Michael Krueger

The unpredictable combination of Lawrence artists Mark Cowardin and Michael Krueger unearths smart yet idiosyncratic gestures.

While their work is visually dissimilar, both artists articulate reverence for nature and as often, a lament for its diminution.

Cowardin’s smoothly graceful sculptures juxtapose materials and conflicting ideas. In “The Great Escape,” a taxidermied pheasant attempts to break from a sculptural, ebonized walnut branch with roots clawing at absent earth. Like all of Cowardin’s sculptures here, the wood is deliberately too beautiful and highly crafted, perhaps a suggestion of our dissociation from the natural world.

As a native Midwesterner, Cowardin questions and accepts his Midwesternness and the complexities that it embodies.

In “Get a Grip,” a circular sculptured branch morphs into a hand, grasping its own roots. A single green leaf juts out of the top. Cowardin explains that it is “a piece that illustrates contrasting desires to hang on to and let go of one’s roots with a dash of optimism. This piece works as both a personal narrative and an illustration of the dangers of interrupting the natural cycle.”

Other sculptures are ambiguous. In “Milk & Honey,” a blindfolded pink flamingo hovers over a trinity of three-rooted branches.

Michael Krueger’s pencil-on-paper drawings are studies in hot neon hues and paradoxical relationships. The drawings are unpeopled, except for “Night Falls,” a riff on the romanticism of Hudson River School paintings. 

Here, groovy hippies are at home with the land, yet the scene is odd and slightly disturbing, despite the idealized overtones. A blood-red, pink, yellow and brown sky compresses the composition, suggesting discord.

Curiously, two of Krueger’s drawings combine furniture and pottery with the land. For Krueger, the exquisite craftsmanship of highboys and Arts and Crafts pottery emphasizes a particular utopian quest for perfection. In “Highboy,” Krueger faces two dressers on a cliff’s edge, as if they are chatting about the precarious place in which they, oddly, find themselves.

“Arts & Crafts Stack” is a totemic mystery. A stack of pottery vessels balances on another cryptic rock edge, juxtaposed against an egg yolk-yellow background.

For Krueger both drawings suggest a specific American arts and crafts idealism. He notes, “the movement was all about creating a utopian balance in life through art and design and living with these objects that resonated with hope and optimism. I have (the highboys and pottery) in the landscape in tenuous situations but they still (in my mind) ring of hopefulness and optimism. It’s about finding a way that the images can be both hopeful and doomed at the same time … tragic and glorious.”

Only Krueger, Mel Ziegler and the late Kate Ericson could suggest that furniture is tragic and glorious and make me believe it.

Other drawings depict dying trees and landscapes with colors that are beautiful, perhaps toxically so. Bitter yellows, greens and pinks envelope branches scattered about on a parched ground. Jagged lines and great slashes of unnatural color bubble to the surface of Krueger’s drawings where the landscape has become unknowable and even alien.

The land is both precious and yet not quite right. Something is amiss where perfection and imperfection coexist. 

Cowardin and Krueger lay claim to and reject our typical relationship to the natural world. While beautifully articulated — the wood is perfect, the colors are crystalline — the work also suggests we are often unrooted, and those colors may be toxic. The world is familiar, yet not utopian, and still cruelly at odds with itself.