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| A Busy Solitude, Jarrett Mellenbruch |
Kansas City artist Jarrett Mellenbruch has a gorgeous sculpture in Bill Brady's gallery in the West Bottoms. See my review here in the Kansas City Star, or read it below. Mellenbruch is also participating in this year's Avenue of the Arts public art project. His site specific installation FLOAT is a field of hammocks facing the iconic Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts.
Here's my review that includes Mellenbruch's A Busy Solitude sculpture.
Unique materials stand out in ‘East West Shift to the Middle, Part II’
Garbage bags and gongshi have nothing in common. But as strange and
alluring bedfellows, they inspire Kansas City artist Jarrett Mellenbruch
and Brooklyn-based Andrew Sutherland, two of the 16 artists exhibiting
at Bill Brady’s gallery. These two artists are the highlights of
“East West Shift to the Middle, Part II,” the second of Brady’s
exhibitions aimed at establishing his presence in the Kansas City
gallery arena.
Mellenbruch and the self-taught Sutherland are
acutely engaged with the material processes of their work, adding a
layer of context beyond the conceptual impulses that inform them.
Mellenbruch’s
satisfyingly chaotic “A Busy Solitude” initially may suggest Petah
Coyne’s wax-covered objects. But Mellenbruch writes that his sculpture
emerges from his interest in Chinese scholar rocks, or gongshi.
His cacophonous work has a counterintuitive empathy with the
contemplative nature of the curious scholar rock. The beautiful and
sculptural gongshi were removed from their natural locations to serve as
focal points of personal reflection, as microcosms for the whole
natural world.
The artist’s incorporation of absurdist objects
such as tiny clown and kitten sculptures, branches and berries creates a
visual Tower of Babel, perhaps also exciting in us deliberation of the
weird world at large.
Sutherland’s three works reveal his
material eccentricity. Both “Untitled (Red Tape)” and “Untitled (Garbage
Bag Painting)” look exactly like red tape and black garbage bags
mounted on canvas and covered with a glazy, shiny surface. However, the
painstaking process involves applying about 40 coats of paint —
pigmented and clear medium — onto garbage bags and a taped box, and then
carefully peeling it off the objects to obtain the skin of a painting,
which Sutherland mounts to canvas.
The pieces are uncanny,
magical and obsessively detailed. While “Red Tape” is his best work in
the exhibition, his sculpture “Geode” — plaster, chicken wire and tiny
shards of car glass individually glued — is also an exciting triumph of
material and process.
Robert Greene’s “Scott,” in his standard
semi-monochromatic palette, is composed of his trademark vertical
painted lines in horizontal rows. Greene’s rhythmic paintings pulsate.
The lines optically undulate up, down and across the canvases.
Kate Shepherd and Gordon Terry explore the vast quietude of space in their dark panel paintings.
Terry’s
trippy hallucinogenic blobs floating in space are a delicious
counterpoint to Shepherd’s strict geometric forms that divide up her
infinite space clustered with tiny white dots.
Other than
Mellenbruch’s and Sutherland’s works, Brady’s exhibition is missing a
major wow factor that might have felt inventive and unusual. While Brady
writes in an email that his goal is “to inform and be a reference for
local artists, collectors, and museums of what is current and trending
on both coasts,” simply racking up 16 artists on white gallery walls
fails, so far, to uncover innovation.
The exhibition is diluted,
not strengthened, by the high number of artists. Fewer artists showing
multiple works would resonate more deeply, because everybody knows that
too many artists spoil the vichyssoise.
