Three Kansas City artists are running a new gallery space, 1522 St. Louis, in Kansas City's West Bottoms. In their first exhibition they are working a little haphazardly, suggesting that they need to put a little more love and attention into exhibition organization. This is their first exhibition, so they have lots of time! I reviewed it in the Kansas City Star here. Or read it below!
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| Katie Ford, "The Science of Idealism + Social Graces," detail |
Viewers struggle to decipher meaning of gallery’s exhibit based on random words
Should you be leery of an exhibition whose theme “was generated randomly”?
The answer may depend on your patience.
A project space is a different animal from a commercial gallery or an institutional space. It can be freer and looser, which can be good or not. It can work if managed properly, but if the goal is to broaden a conversation with an audience, then a more specific vision may be the first order for the folks running the 1522 St. Louis space.
Kansas City artists Erika Lynne Hanson, Justin Gainan and Mike Erickson are operating 1522 St. Louis, a small space in the West Bottoms. Their inaugural exhibition, “Naamah, Uliginous, Laborer,” features an installation by Kansas City artist Katie Ford.
Hanson said the gallery exists as an experimental, organic space in which invited artists respond to ideas or arbitrary words presented by the three artists running the space.
The gallery’s stated model “is that of the studio practice where one action, be it a random or well-researched decision, informs the next.”
Isn’t that simply everyday life, one action informing the next? Wake, get out of bed; stay in bed, skip work; action, consequence; and so on until your days are filled.
For this inaugural installation, Ford was asked to respond to the three words of the title, which Hanson said were randomly chosen — “a dictionary was thrown into the air” — with no thought to content or meaning.
Isn’t this idea straight out of reality TV, with little regard for expertise?
Despite the admittedly careless challenge imposed by the artists in charge, Ford produces an earnest, if somewhat impenetrable, artistic response.
In an installation composed of bundled sticks, plastic-wrapped cardboard and other detritus, Ford’s materials seem to denote place, with common debris defining the space — Thomas Hirschhorn in miniature.
She said by email that her interest in the failed social/scientific experiment Biosphere 2 informed her work.“In looking for a way to interpret these words in a way that rang true with the concepts in which I’m already interested, using these experiments in isolated living and re-created biospheres seemed to make a lot of sense.”
There’s a platform covered with cardboard mimicking hardwood flooring, bundles of sticks and a flag that seems to suggest a landing or colonialist land claim.
“I enjoy playing with the interactions between the materials themselves and also let the materials remain fairly obvious or bare because I like the human implication, the levels of manipulation,” she said. “Also because of this, I mostly like to start with fairly raw materials.”
Although she is trained as a printmaker, Ford’s interest in different materials is wide-ranging and generous.
The installation, which Ford titled “The Science of Idealism + Social Graces,” is raw but not overwhelming like some accumulation-based installations can be. Although the tiny gallery space allotted might have curtailed her work.
However, audiences need conceptual and visual access; we can’t all have long email exchanges with artists about their art. The meaningless title should have been dropped because it provides no reference or access point for viewers, and, in the end, the artist produced a respectable installation based on her own interests in spite of, not because of, the title she was given.
It’s a good thing to have another exhibition space in town, but “studio practice” may be an insular academic conceit that is difficult to translate to the actual world of casual visitors.
Isn’t the goal for a larger conversation than the one you can have with your friends? In the future, the goal to expand artistic and conceptual ideas to include an ever-wider ring of participants might be more winningly achieved with a more thoughtful approach.
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