The 2005 Charlotte Street Foundation Awards
With the Charlotte Street Foundation awards, the idea that Kansas City
artists are increasingly breaking new ground with their work and worthy
of recognition becomes less of a local mantra and more of an established
cultural truth. The funding buys award recipients time and materials to
pursue new ideas, and the out-of-town panelists who weigh in on selecting
award winners offer an objective vote of confidence that lingers as a
note-to-self about why Kansas City artists should be on their short lists
for future shows and events. In this year’s round of award winners,
performance mingles with visual aesthetics. Established artists explore
innovative directions after years of success while emerging ones take
flight. It is an exciting, engaging mix that ensures an interesting
future for Kansas City.
Craig Subler
In past years, Craig Subler’s fascination with fabricated spaces
emerged in images of Italian gardens and miniature greenhouses. With his
latest series of small drawings and paintings, he turns his attention
to the interior landscape of the museum, a realm where the blatant
commercialism of gift shops encroaches on the high-brow beauty of fine
art, and visitors are depicted as everything from diffident bystanders to
dutiful onlookers. Subliminal art historical references (for example,
the nude woman reminiscent of Paola Veronese’s The Allegory
of Love: Unfaithfulness who appears in the corner of one of
Subler’s sketches) are thrown together with pointedly generic-looking
sculptures and amorphous cartoon creatures, creating a garage-sale
assemblage that lacks any kind of cultural hierarchy or narrative.
Subler also evokes interesting questions about the museum experience with
tongue-in-cheek details. In many of his drawings, visitors are featured
wearing large shapeless dots, a caricature of the little buttons people
pin to their shirts while wandering through museum galleries. Figures also
sometimes stare blankly into space or face a different direction from the
art on display, visual cues that make the actual viewers of Subler’s
own works self-conscious of their interaction with his imagery, and
contemplative of the growing disconnect between people and art. The
presence of exoticism in the form of a giant African head and the
one-size-fits-all art appreciation of postcards for sale in the ever-present
gift shop add to Subler’s commentary on the perplexity of the museum
experience and the visitor’s sense of cultural literacy.
Subler compiles these multi-layered collages from his own lifelong observations
of the museum as muse, including 22 years as the director of the University of
Missouri-Kansas City Gallery of Art. His works, like their content, possess a
random patchwork physicality: look closely at the postcards and vases in
Shop/Museum and Shop/Museum # 2 and you’ll find
lovingly created, exquisite detail, made possible by individual drawings
being cut out and pasted into the paintings.
Max Key
Like Subler, Max Key also mines his professional identity and history for
insights about our ability to handle massive amounts of imagery. A
decorative painter who spends serious time contemplating the interiors
of countless homes, Key creates wall-size paintings of feral, fleshy
plant-like formations that sprout out of old-fashioned wallpaper patterns
and architectural elements, often adorned with glowing globes or twinkling
cityscape-like lights. Gaudy metallic accents and sexual imagery, such
as the phallic, multi-colored cattails in Prune and Spoon and
the breast-shaped scaling and entwined pink and blue limbs of
What Happens in Heaven Stays in Heaven, create a seedy, overdone
Vegas glitz that is both hypnotic and disturbing. At certain moments,
particularly in Prune and Spoon, the suggestive shapes and
colors of Key’s plant life seem to shed light on the complexity
of intimate relationships and their touch-and-go fragility, germinated
in the flashy fertility of city nightlife.
His prolific flora also sometimes share the spotlight with some pretty
heady Biblical imagery: bitten apples, bleeding fruit and doves. To
the outside observer, these loaded symbols suggest a criticism of
the oversimplified system of good and evil in the Christian faith that
invades our gardens of cultural and political thought with a pervasive
subtlety. The idea of old designs from the 1970s mutating into a leafy
carnival of light and color also hints more generally at the surprising
truths that sometimes take seed in the most tacit, everyday settings
of our lives, the perennial past that ceaselessly pushes through our
carefully constructed present.
Callyann Casteel
Callyann Casteel shares Key’s passion for patterns, but in
her hands, those patterns become towering, floppy creature costumes
designed and worn for public performances. Casteel, who first
gained notoriety for her giant hamburgers and calculators that
danced for amused onlookers at gallery openings and in parks, now
seems to be focusing her skills on creating more abstract works.
Her latest creations are a celebration of excessive patterning –
bulky chains that epitomize “bling”
(a term that refers to status-symbol jewelry), spike-like horns, and
other decorative elements in a hodgepodge of colors and fabrics.
Born from Casteel’s delicate sketches and love for fashion,
these large, column-like assemblages reflect our infatuation with
the possibilities of adornment and accessorizing: the person wearing
Casteel’s works can create endless combinations with the
stacked layers and exaggerated styles.
The public presence of Casteel’s creatures in communal spaces
also derails any attempts to keep art inaccessible and esoteric,
reserved only for gallery insiders and art history nerds. It is
worth noting, however, that her creations completely cover up the
individual inside, creating a protective shield of posturing and
fashionista flaunting.
Various influences inspire Casteel’s work: children’s
puppetry, Matthew Barney, Quintron and Miss Pussycat (a musical group
in New Orleans whose members wear outrageous outfits and perform with
puppets). But what stands out in her particular art is something more
akin to the Hopi Indians’ way of explaining their katchina
dances: when dancers put on their masks and leg adornments, the
garments are never identified as or referred to as “costumes”;
once they begin dancing, tribe members simply become the kachinas in
body and spirit, and invite good fortune into their lives and that of
their communities.
Sean Ward
Sean Ward’s imagination is an arcade of noise, color, and endless
ideas chasing each other down and beating each other into submission. In
the past, his hyperreal sensibilities have run the gamut of everything
from performance art involving several guys humping a giant foam head to
Cabbage-Patch-like monsters made out of pantyhose to a faux volcano that
smoked out a gallery opening. Now he’s trying to buckle down that
energy on canvas with sublimely freakish portraits and interior landscapes
that wrestle between formal aesthetic beauty and horror movie madness.
His interest in the grotesque is more of a love of its limitless creative
potential than a testosterone-fueled fascination. “I like what
horror allows the figure to do ... you can rip the arm off and put it
somewhere completely different, disfigure the body,” he explained.
Ward is also interested in showing viewers that the world is flooded with
startling imagery and ideas found in everyday advertising: junk mail inserts,
store catalogs, product packaging. “There’s some kick-ass stuff
in that trash,” he once said.
For example, in Portraits 3 & 4 Ward excerpts a tiny picture
from the package of a Halloween mask purchased at K-mart and glorifies it
on a huge canvas with roaring detail. The result is a magnificent rock-star
zombie reminiscent of the character Sloth from the 1980s movie Goonies.
It is this type of content that epitomizes Ward’s work: funny,
intriguing, and gratuitous all at the same time, electrified by color, depth
and form. In Apparent Monster Hands, another image borrowed
from a Halloween costume, scaly green hands exude flesh-colored fingertips,
suggesting a human presence growing out of dimestore ugliness, an attempt
to grasp what we normally cast off as temporary or unattractive and somehow make it useful.
With his unabashed love of accessible, disposable imagery and visual landfill,
Ward proves that you can never run out of ideas because they exist in the very
fabric that makes up our daily cultural landscapes.
Miles Neidinger
Neidinger shares Ward’s skill for making the mundane arresting. A
married father of two who works during the day as an electrician’s
apprentice, Neidinger’s daily life is seemingly steeped in American
ordinariness. In his job, he studies blueprints of cookie-cutter housing
developments. He lives in a townhome where his studio shares space with the laundry
machines in the basement. Yet it is a potent setting for mind-boggling work
that revolutionizes the functionality and visual perception of everyday objects.
Neidinger considers the way we categorize and assign meaning to the daily stuff
that drifts in and out of our lives, and then he incorporates intelligent appropriations
of objects and their industrial designs into graceful, otherworldly installations. In
his past works, his nimble precision turned coat hangers from Wal-mart into smooth,
spiraling tunnels that seductively curved around walls. Coffee stirrers were transformed
into remarkable symphonies of color solidified into touchable, pleasing lines. Now
he takes another generic item – aluminum foil – and uses it as a
sculptural material that draws remarkable shapes and forms into architectural space,
breaking open the complacency of an interior with a reality-bending mindscape. The
physicality of his work resides with sculpture, but its aesthetic feels more like
drawing. It is a creative act that is nothing short of astonishing.
All essays by Becca Ramspott, an arts writer who works in marketing and
communications at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art.
