Charlotte Street Foundation

As part of Third Friday Art Downtown June 18, UCP presents Event Horizons, a touring program of new work by film, video, and new media artists Thomas Comerford (Chicago), and Sabine Gruffat & Bill Brown (Madison, Wisconsin), at Project Space, 21 East 12th Street, 8pm (suggested donation, $5). The event will run approximately 2 hours.

This program includes a screening of Comerford’s The Indian Boundary Line, which follows a road in Chicago, Rogers Avenue, that traces the 1816 Treaty of St. Louis boundary between the United States and “Indian Territory.” In doing so, it examines the collision between the vernacular landscape and the symbolic one, and suggests how this land and its history are an index for the shifting inhabitants, relationships, boundaries and ideas of landscape — as well as the consequences — which have accompanied the transformation of the “New World.”

Also featured is Gruffat & Brown’s Time Machine, a multimedia live performance in which the artists explore new way of telling stories with technologies that are both cutting edge and obsolete, including slide projector, analog video switcher, record player, digital video projector, and computer.  During the performance, the stage becomes the control panel for an immense ship and the projection screen a window through which different spaces and times are visualized, as Gruffat and Brown assume the role of space-time tourists driven by an exploratory urge.

Read full press release.

American Institute of Architects-Kansas City (AIA-KC) is being awarded Bronze level “Art Achievement” by Art through Architecture (AtA) for Recirculate, a new site-specific art installation by Kansas City based artist Marcie Miller Gross.  Commissioned for AIA-KC’s new offices on the ground floor of 1801 McGee, a historic building in the East Crossroads District of Kansas City, Mo, Recirculate debuts with a public reception on Friday, June 4, 6:30-9:30 pm.

“As an artist and maker, I am compelled with the dynamic dialogue between art and architecture, between objects and space,” said Miller Gross.  In this case, the artist was particularly inspired by the office space’s high, concrete ceilings, the “marks and traces of history” evident in the space, and by “the activity of cables and electrical wiring” that Helix Architecture + Design, which designed the recent renovation of the space for AIA-KC, opted to leave exposed overhead. 

Identifying the electrical cable trays that carry telecommunications wires through the office as “an inherent element within the vocabulary of this utilitarian space,” Gross determined to employ these same metal trays as a key component of her artwork. Her installation incorporates a series of cable trays as the support structures for colorful, neatly folded stacks of discontinued fabric samples, which Miller Gross collected from architectural office libraries in the Kansas City area.

Marcie Miller Gross was awarded this $5500 commission by a committee comprised of AIA-KC Executive Director Dawn Kirkwood;  AIA-KC Board Member Kimball Hales, architect, Hufft Projects; and immediate-past AIA-KC Board Member Debra L. Smith, Architect and Planner, City of KCMO, Water Services Department.

Through AtA, a partnership of American Institute of Architects-Kansas City and Charlotte Street Foundation, new architectural projects may earn Gold, Silver or Bronze levels of Art Achievement by dedicating a percentage of the total construction budget to collecting artworks, commissioning temporary or permanent artworks, and/or including artists on design teams. AtA facilitates this process by providing a web-based database at http://artarch.org, featuring work by some 90 artists selected for the program through a competitive process, and by providing hands-on support for project implementation, from artist selection through completion. Read full press release.

Community + Loneliness, opening at Paragraph, 23 East 12th Street on May 21, 6-9pm (with curator remarks at 6:30pm), examines the conflict between desire for community and lifestyle and personal choices that undermine the fulfillment of this desire.  “In American culture, there is a desire for community, but also a lifestyle that does not support building communities,” writes curator Angela Lopez.  “This culture in many ways supports forgetting individual roots…. The first solution to ‘Starting over’ is to move. Further, the marketing of convenience seems to pull people apart in more ways than it brings them together… it promises more time to spend with family, friends, etc.,  however in many ways, it takes away the possibility of neighborhood communities.  In a transient culture, it is difficult to maintain stable reliable relationships.”

Community + Loneliness features artists whose work expresses a sense of loneliness stemming from isolation from or within a community, as well as works that speak to community identification and attempts toward community building.  Artists are Miki Baird, Amy Casey, AJ Halbrook, Peregrine Honig, Amy Kligman, Michael Lopez, Hugh Merrill, Charlie Mylie, Jason Needham, Anne Pearce, Sean Semones, Drew Roth,  Rachel Wetchensky, and Whoop Dee Doo.

The exhibition runs May 21-June 26, with gallery hours Thursdays & Saturdays, 12-5pm. Read full press release.

See KC Free Press coverage.

See article in Review.

Troost Troost Troost is a collaborative project of University of Kansas School of Architecture, Design and Planning, the Kansas City Art Institute Graphic Design Department, and el dorado inc, which explores the present and future of Troost Avenue.  It opens at Project Space, 21 East 12th Street, on Friday May 21, 6-9pm, and runs through June 12.

What is Troost Avenue in 2010?  And what role might architecture play in shaping its future?  Which pieces of its history, physical and cultural fabric are important to carry forward? Troost, Troost, Troost encompasses a series of iterative architectural proposals exploring the potential of an incremental infill approach to revitalizing Troost Avenue, with a program including a public radio station, a branch library, a community bank, an urban Habitat ReStore, and mixed-use commercial and residential development  on the section of Troost Avenue from 39th Street to Emanuel Cleaver II Boulevard.  Also included are video essays and graphic design work that explore the critical issue of understanding Troost for what it is today. 

Exhibition hours at Thursdays + Saturdays, 12-5pm. Read full press release. 

Voices of Community + Loneliness, on Saturday, May 22, 1pm at Paragraph, 23 East 12th Street, features writers and performers responding to Paragraph exhibition’s themes. The program, free and open to the public, features Gina Kaufmann’s “Status Report,” for which Ron Megee, Rita Brinkerhoff and Kaufmann will stand on soap boxes, shouting real Facebook status updates onto the street to greet visitors. By adapting online behavior to a physical space, visitors will get to see the humor, loneliness and occasional beauty of broadcasting unrelated sentiments into a shared void. Concluding “Status Report,” Pitch Managing Editor Scott Wilson will speak about how people behave differently in the dark. The program also features a presentation of poetry inspired by the exhibition theme and organized by Glenn North, Poet-in-Residence at the American Jazz Museum. Featured poets are North, Robert Brown, Taylor Brown, and Camiel J. Irving.

The evening of May 22, at 8pm at The Brick, 1727 Megee, Gina Kaufmann hosts Storytelling: Community + Loneliness, a night of stories about the unexpected ways in which feelings of loneliness and feelings of belonging can intersect.  Storytellers featured include Rolf Potts, Kaite Mediatore Stover, Beth Byrd-Lonski,  Frankie Krainz, Meshel Cook, Hadley Johnson, and Brian Busby.