Since its beginning in 1997, the Charlotte Street Foundation has recognized
and awarded over $70,000 to twenty—two artists and presented
exhibitions of their work throughout Kansas City. The fourth annual
Charlotte Street Foundation 2000 exhibition features the work of six outstanding
visual artists working in Kansas City: Tom Gregg, Adriane Herman,
Peregrine Honig, Warren Rosser, Jesse Small and James Woodfill.
While considering the artists at hand, five
fundamental motifs emerged: industry, physicality, labor, meditation
and message. By industry, it is meant that the artist demonstrates
a particular admiration for the timeless values of strenuous mechanical
activity. Physicality refers to the evidence of execution—
the mark of the artist—and labor denotes the signs of meticulous
work. Meditation indicates an especially introspective look at
the nature of art-making, while message marks a concern for examining
concrete subjects.
Of course these elements are important to all six artists, as
are many other rewarding aspects these five motifs do not address.
But by attending to some of the elements that seem most striking,
I hope to honor each artist's unique perspective. At the same
time, these themes offer ways in which to view the works on display.
Warren Rosser
In the realms of industry physicality and meditation Warren Rosser
has been a leader for some thirty years. His work since late 1998
returns to his earlier love of painting, after a long series of
three-dimensional painting-and-construction works of the 1980s
and early 1990s. Rosser's enthusiasm for paint can be heard in
his praise of Golden brand acrylics ("You open a jar and
you want to lick it"), yet the discipline of painting is
problematic. Herein lies his current contributions to industry,
physicality and meditation: not content with the results from
paint brushes (he sees them as "too predictable"), Rosser
now uses the less-familiar poetics of squeegee and stencil to
provide an objective distance, removing complacency from his work.
The large works are painted by walking around them on the floor.
Rosser rakes his squeegee over the hammer-like stenciled components
in the foreground while both they and the background are wet,
thereby collapsing space in broken swipes of color. The resulting
connotations of erratic movement speak of earth-moving machines
with wheels off-track; projected film images rattling through
a misfeed; or out of register four-color print jobs, as if to
lament the passing of the analog era.
Jesse Small
Jesse Small shares Rosser's interests in industry and physicality
while orienting himself toward conveying a message. In addition
to working in clay, Small often uses a plasma cutter to incise
gorgeous looping lines and floral shapes into steel. He borrows
forms directly from the military: metal plates with cut-outs echo
the outline of Stealth bombers and army helmets become carved
to look like lace. This clash of macho sources and unabashed beauty
forms the heart of Small's aesthetics of juxtaposition. He seeks
out helmets from the Vietnam era, though he was born when the
war was over; some of his arabesques derive from Vietnamese currency,
while others begin as U.S. camouflage patterns; his artworks themselves
signify sophistication, while the subject of war embodies barbarism.
These contradictions focus attention on the larger implications
of Small's art: by combining and mixing images of Southeast Asia
and the U.S., he reminds us that the Vietnam War still deserves
recognition and reconciliation. In doing so, younger Americans
learn that such conflicts affect all of us, not just soldiers,
and that one can be a patriot and still protest war—potentially
a timely message in this era of U.N.-sponsored police acts.
Peregrine Honig
Physicality and message are integral to the drawings of Peregrine
Honig as well. The pen, ink and gouache she uses cannot
be erased, permitting only a single pass to render likenesses
credibly. Her linear style echoes this sure-handedness and feels
familiar: we are drawn to it with happy memories of cartoons from
youth, though they did not touch on subjects such as sex. Or did
they, only in a veiled way? In this, one locates the crux of Honig's
concerns - querying the construction of female identity. For her
current body of work she conducted cultural research at a college
sorority and by viewing pornography and visiting a strip club.
Honig discovered that both cultures raise provocative questions
about womanhood. What makes a woman want to be accepted into a
sorority, and what will she do for that acceptance? Why does a
girl decide to be wild, and where will this wildness lead her?
Why do women dress up for each other and how does this compare
to why they dress up for men? What makes a pair of identical twins
want to pose nude together? When does this all begin? In. the
end, Honig's drawings attract through their ambivalence, as bittersweet
as blosson-ting sexuality itself.
Adriane Herman
Adriane Herman diverges somewhat from the physicality of
Rosser, Small and Honig. Her brush strokes and collaged sections
appear textured and corporeal, but in reality her prints are labor-intensive
"virtually physical" meditations on art and life. Herman
painstakingly paints and collages small tableaux that often incorporate
depictions of food and domestic scenes. Sometimes, as for this
show, she digitizes this entire product using a flatbed scanner
and manipulates portions of it with a computer, combining and
recombining fragments from her oeuvre with illustrations and text
culled from old books. Herman then uses a Piezo inkjet printer
to output the final form, a dialog between digital and analog
that often departs from her starting point. Her ostensible subject
matter is the often-humorous non-linear narrative that results
from mixing and matching bits of pictures and words, but in her
view her underlying content is decision-making. How do we choose
what to include and what to discard in lives inundated by images
and information? Herman's delectable prints and a new body of
work inspired by game boards celebrate non-linear approaches to
life's unknowns. As she quips, "John Cage had the I Ching.
I've got a plastic spinner."
Tom Gregg
Work ethic and meditations on art-making are also important ingredients
in the art of Tom Gregg. Observation plays a key role in
realizing these ends: as Gregg says, he has never gotten over
the excitement of carefully crafting a still-life that resembles
its model. To be sure, the portraits of cherries, apples, oranges
and so forth in the front of his compositions reward the eye with
their vitality and convincing three-dimensionality. But these
paintings are "about" much more than still-life. Instead,
they seem more like explorations of the act of observation, the
art of painting and its history. These rich layers can be mined
in Gregg's backgrounds, which exist in a flatter picture space
not intended to project like his foregrounds. One's view flickers
fore and aft so that pictorial space constantly collapses and
is reborn, as if each picture is a metaphor for the history of
Modernist painting - but with a wily spirit that evokes Postmodernism.
Gregg's images enable more specific connections with modern
Euro-American art history. His fruit, ashtrays, knives, guns,
etc. remind one of Pop art's everyday objects. A Pop presence
has permeated his backdrops also in recent years (along with Neo-expressionist
tendencies), but for this exhibition Gregg has produced impressive
pared-down works more in the vein of color-field abstractions.
James Woodfill
A meditative disposition can be found again in the sculpture of
James Woodfill, while his occupation with industry and
movement brings the exhibition full circle to Warren Rosser. Woodfill
has become well-known for oscillating works like these light-emitting
metal drums that, despite their apparent complexity, are delightfully
simple. A small electric motor turns a heavy rod that swings the
barrel to life. No two cylinders rotate in the same fashion or
throw light and shadows in the same direction. The deeper meaning
of individuality becomes apparent as a drum starts up after being
switched on or bumped. Each wobbles eccentrically until finding
its harmonic resonance, a principle Woodfill borrows from physics
to describe the unique identifying characteristics of a barrel's
spin. A number of factors determine the harmonic resonance, such
as the motor's speed and weight and length of the turning rod
(which are both fixed), and variables that the artist "tunes:"
the height of the peg lifting the drum from the floor and the
amount of steel he cuts out from a barrel. In effect, Woodfill's
singular creatures are elegant artificial life forms, a charming
species that encourages us to greet intricacies like biology and
computer technology with the wide-eyed sense of wonder that they
deserve.
Ultimately, the 2000 Charlotte Street Foundation recipients portray
visual art in the city as quite healthy. Although they were not
necessarily meant to serve as a cross-section, these six artists
personify the admixture of diversity and cross-pollinating that
distinguishes lively art scenes across the country.
—James Martin
