Established in 1997 to recognize outstanding artistic achievement,
the Charlotte Street Foundation has distributed $107,500 in direct grants
to twenty—eight local artists. In economic terms, these grants
enable artists to focus on creating work, often providing means
for experimentation with new formats and approaches. In terms
of career, the award and consequent exhibition offer significant
acclaim, encouragement, exposure, and opportunity for critical
feedback. On a broader level, the Fund raises the bar in Kansas
City, representing a goal for emerging artists to work toward
and an increased sense of the city's viability as a place for
working artists to stay. As the Fund celebrates its fifth anniversary,
it should come as no surprise to find Kansas City commanding national
attention for the richness of artwork being made right here and
now.
This year, the Charlotte Street Foundation honors David Ford, Lester
Goldman, Leeah Joo, Eric Sall, Kati Toivanen and the Lifetime
Achievement of Ken Ferguson. Their diversity testifies to the
breadth of work being made here, as well as to the expansive terrain
of contemporary art in general. Yet while embodying unique sensibilities,
one aspect these artists share is a hybrid or heterogeneous quality—a
refusal to be confined or easily categorized. Rather, they embrace
fluidity, a slippage among genres or media. A "photographer"
pushes into the realm of installation; "painters" create
three—dimensional works or blur lines between figurative
and abstract, formal and conceptual, naive and knowing. Engaging
body and mind, their artworks require an active viewer to participate
in physical play, navigate multiple viewpoints, or negotiate the
competing and conflicting tendencies of a single surface. Complex
as life itself, their creations reside in that fertile zone which
is the in between.
David Ford
Prolific and multi—faceted, David Ford's efforts span a range
of disciplines and cultures. Throughout, his work exemplifies
an approach of culling and combining images and information from
a variety of sources — a popular practice in the latter half of
the 20th century. But, unlike many artists, Ford does not borrow
forms without concern for the contexts from which they derive
and meanings they carry. Drawing together signs of "First World"
and "Third World," "East" and "West," "high" and "low," "beauty"
and "ugliness," "piety" and "sacrilege," he constructs an arena
for a complex dance of competing forces, a boxing match in which
clash is exploited. Individual images and phrases function as
the formal and conceptual building blocks of a fluid, ever—morphing
and expanding language of which each artwork is one possible expression.
The stress between opposing tendencies ultimately forces reevaluation.
Sublimation and degradation are inseparable as yin and yang. When
a kitschy rainbow is painted onto a crude wooden cutout in el
baratero ("the lowest"), does it become so pathetic
and downtrodden as to be again beautiful, true, meaningful? The
peasant woman at the heart of i love you is simultaneously
goddess and whore, a trans—cultural Shiva derived from liquor
bottle label who offers comforts both sinful and sincere. As in
a pinball game, a gorgeous orange tiger, sailing ship and blazing
flames compete for attention in BONUS KILL. Always proffering
choice, Ford straddles between "I love you," and "I
would KILL KILL KILL," simultaneously drawing us in and pushing
us away. For an "infinite maquette" performed/presented
on the exhibition's opening night, he places a small plastic ball,
bearing the hand—painted phrase "the past," a block
away, guarded and surrounded by props. On the sidewalk outside
the gallery, a telescope, carefully positioned, frames "the
past" in its lens. Where does the artwork exist—in the
view captured by the scope, at the scene itself, in the distance
between them, in our own minds?
The gap between here and there is infinite, an open field of play.
However, in a manner that parallels our typical mode of perception,
that vast space is collapsed and contained in the limited frame
of the lens. As in the rest of his work, Ford highlights the difference
while exploring the connection. Offering intimacy and distance,
symbol and substance, he seeks to upset the fixed equations by
which we order the world.
Lester Goldman
Perhaps no artist in Kansas City understands better than Lester
Goldman the possibilities enabled by exploding pre—existing
borders. Long a major presence in the art community, Goldman has
influenced students and peers alike as Professor of painting at
Kansas City Art Institute since 1966 and through challenging exhibition
projects. Yet while his work manifests a confidence and vision
informed by years of experience, among Goldman's attributes are
an almost childlike energy, inventiveness, and disposal to play.
Once a realist painter, Goldman incorporates figurative elements
in Two Feet, Three and a Half Hats and One Gifted Liar,
though here they bear the influence of investigations into theater,
performance, and puppetry. Inspired by an earlier painting, this
work translates two—dimensional surface into three—dimensional
presence, reinventing striped and solid shapes as life—sized
actors in a perpetually unfolding drama. Conventional painting
requires compressing forms into flat space. Goldman's illusions
enter the "real world" instead, enabling viewers to
interact with them physically and directly — to know them
better. Further, the painting/sculpture hybrid is site specific,
as shadows cast upon its purple backdrop become integral to the
work's completion. In the mid 80s, Goldman undertook a ten—year,
three—exhibition project, The Latest Blow to Mirth,
juxtaposing paintings, sculptures, collaborative performance,
film, video and music. Offering multi—sensory, kinetic environments,
he imagined the viewer's experience as akin to wandering inside
one of Joseph Cornell's boxed assemblages. Goldman's latest work
reflects this will to create a vibrant, shifting stage—an
impulse he succinctly channels into the framework of a single
"painting".
Goldman's transgression of boundaries to open room for alternate
interpretation surfaces in every choice he makes. A scavenger
of materials, he understands the beauty and integrity of a scrap
of metal, gourd, or brown paper bag, where functionality, wear
and tear, and/or non preciousness lend a vitality often exceeding
that of more traditional art materials. A found sheet of copper,
marked with fingerprints, tells the "truth". Vinyl fabric—pliant,
colorful, and durable—is well suited to sculptural use, yet
its life as the stuff of gymnastic mats or padded rooms lends
other connotations. Dressmakers' patterns inject bodily references
into abstract paintings, while their cut lines and arrows contribute
gesture, movement and directionality. Just as a belief in disrupting
fixity once prompted him to pose a still model amidst a circulating
rollerblader, Goldman's work lives perched on the ledge between
chaos and control, chance and essence, here and there.
Leeah Joo
Whether as moody interior scenes or sites of construction and
demolition, Leeah Joo is drawn to multivalent moments. Focusing
on the subtle matter of the everyday, her paintings hinge on a
dynamic of simultaneous convergence and dislocation, interface
and isolation. With directness and intelligence, grounded by a
firm command of realist painting, Joo mines the seemingly mundane
for its metaphorical resonance.
Residing at the intersection of portraiture, still life, and landscape,
with a distinctly conceptual bent, Joo's newest paintings incorporate
her immediate environment as subject. Specifically, they capture
the view caught in the windowpane of her attic studio, where bits
of the world beyond—patch of grass, rooftop—mingle with
reflections of the interior. Painted at various times of day,
the balance between that seen through and that reflected by the
window's glass shifts from one to the next. A disruptive metal
grille, filtering light and casting shadows (while also introducing
a grid—like pattern that invokes the language of abstract
painting), anchors the painted image to a specific physical location:
the point between inside and out. By physically separating interior
and exterior, domestic and worldly, confinement and freedom, self
and other, it operates as a means of crystallizing the symbolic
divisions blurred elsewhere. In this way, too, the grille heightens
conflict between the window's transparent and mirroring natures,
between deep space (the view out) and flat surface (the reflected
within).
By obstructing our sight of any one thing, Joo promotes longing
for whole, uncompromised vision. Making us aware of but also thwarting
our desire for a pure "window" onto the world, she reminds
us, as did Magritte in pairing an image of a pipe with the caption
"Ceci n'est pas une pipe," that a painting is a painting—not
the thing itself (Both view and reflection are illusions, skillfully
rendered on a flat surface). Further, by obfuscating and infusing
the landscape with her own self—portrait, Joo makes explicit
her role as image—maker, as the filter through which the
viewer's experience is mediated. While residing as an elusive,
shadowy reflection, she reveals herself before us as the author
of our vision.
Eric Sall
A 1999 graduate of the Kansas City Art Institute, Eric Sall is
just beginning his artistic career. Nonetheless, the assured,
evocative paintings shown in recent exhibitions, including a major
solo show at Joseph Nease Gallery in 2000, have definitively announced
an emerging talent. In these newest works—his largest ever—Sall
demonstrates a keen awareness of where painting has been, while
asserting a unique vision. Their monumental scale, splattered
backgrounds, energetic surfaces and the sheer physicality of Sall's
process attest to the influence of Abstract Expressionism, embodied
in the figure of Jackson Pollock.
Yet, savvy to postmodernism's deconstuctive discourse (which argues
against the idea of "pure" painting, claiming instead
the ever—presence of real world referents), Sall introduces
what feel to be tangible objects. Crisp outlines imposed on even
the most abstract, painterly passages transform them into shapes
that feel like something, thus creating a spatial division
between foreground and background. Here again, we are in an in
between zone. This push pull is furthered by elements bordering
on the figurative. Bleeding purples and blacks suggest delicate
Chinese ink paintings of mountains. Flat stripes double as a shallow
box, from which a densely colored field exuberantly emerges like
the springing clown of a jack in the box. Another painterly form
reads as a leg extended, sandwiching a gray object between two
toes. Yet lest we begin to believe in these as representations
of actual objects, Sall lets drips of paint flow over their borders.
Thus collapsing the illusionistic space he has begun to create,
he sets in motion a perpetual back and forth.
Kati Toivanen
Kati Toivanen is emblematic of a younger generation of artists
using the camera as a tool for creating artworks as conceptually
rich as they are technically accomplished. Equally at ease with
computers as with film, she moves freely among approaches, adapting
tactics to suit ideas. This facility is evident in work created
specifically for the Artspace, where the photograph serves merely
as a starting point for sculpture, installation, even performance.
Here Toivanen weaves together many themes explored through earlier
bodies of work including issues of gender stereotypes, sexuality,
play and games, voyeurism, a tension between the seen and unseen,
the suggestive and explicit.
Toivanen has created an interactive space, inviting a process
of personal discovery. Using a strategy of appropriation, she
relies on familiarity with popular games and toys to draw us into
play, then disrupts expectation. In lieu of the seemingly innocuous
images we nostalgically anticipate are pictures of baby dolls,
often mangled from use and abuse, or images of tangled, synthetic
hair. Each presentation represents a specific permutation of ideas.
A memory game, comprising a search for pairs, requires flipping
red cardboard squares— an activity evoking a peep show, where
fragments of bodies are revealed then quickly concealed. A puzzle
involves a prolonged quest to reconcile hundreds of pieces into
one seamless whole. The very name "Viewmaster" alludes
to the possessive nature of the viewer's gaze, as we peer through
lenses to spy life—like visions held forever beyond reach.
Through all of these formats, Toivanen explores desire as a suspended
longing, seduction as reliant on delaying/denying satisfaction
(Once the puzzle is complete, it no longer holds our attention).
Disturbing this formula by means of un—idealized images ranging
from alarming to absurd, heart—wrenching to repulsive, she
forces an awareness and self—consciousness that counteract
the escapist pleasure of play. The rigorous stylistic closeness
of her co—options to their standard forms —crisp, graphic,
iconic, commercially packaged—renders them all the more potent.
We are left to question the nature of these games and dolls—and
ourselves—as plastic eyes stare back, demanding a second
look.
Ken Ferguson
The second—ever recipient of a Charlotte Street Foundation Lifetime
Achievement Award, Ken Ferguson is an artist whose accomplishments
are lauded not just in Kansas City, but internationally. As Professor
and Chair of the ceramics department at Kansas City Art Institute
for over thirty years, subject of a major retrospective of the
Nelson—Atkins Museum of Art and countless other exhibitions,
and one who continues to make work into his 70s, Ferguson has
imparted a love and respect for clay to multitudes.
As a graduate student at Alfred University, resident potter and
studio manager at the Archie Bray Foundation in Helena, Montana,
and through years of teaching, Ferguson mastered the craft of
functional pottery, developing formidable skills on the wheel
and in handling glazes that integrally inform his work today.
Yet as his command of the medium expanded over the years, so too
has his willingness to assert his own creativity. Functional pots
yielded to works meant for display, in which the physical experience
of touching an object is replaced by an energy so visceral it
feels tactile. In the context of this exhibition, Ferguson's work
looks both timeless and remarkably contemporary. Too, it shares
with the younger artists' work a hybrid nature. The leaping hares
of Basket with Triple Hare Handle effortlessly bind Eastern
and Western influences, the spontaneous, expressive gesture and
the carefully planned form, tradition and innovation, strength
and fragility, grace and awkwardness. Udder T—Pot with Mermaid
Handle derives its tripodal shape (three separate vessels
dexterously fused together) from the traditional Chinese "li"
form, the sensuality and sexual connotations of which Ferguson
flaunts. Adding a half—drooping phallic spout, world—weary mermaid's
head, and glaze that activates the surface while suggesting both
mossy growth and patina, he transforms the vessel into a lively,
multi—gendered, multi—cultural stage, which yet retains powerful
wholeness. This and all of Ferguson's works teem with vitality,
as formal prowess weds lyrical expression to glorious effect.
—Kate Hackman, Curator
