Charlotte Street Foundation

With Dual Singularity – opening at Urban Culture Project Space January 21, 6-9pm (with a helium baloon release and artist remarks at 6:30pm), and running through March 6 – emerging artists Justin Rulo-Sabe and Brandon Barr seek to interpret patterns of information embedded in natural phenomena, and to use digital media to translate that information into new languages and ways of seeing. Through video installations, photographic prints, writings, drawings, and “algorithmic walks,” their exhibition posits a way of looking at information as values to be transformed and recombined, until the ways of seeing that information become variable and multifarious enough to suggest near-infinite possibility.

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THE DINING ROOM PROJECT: Intersections of Food, Art, and the Rituals of Eating is a collaborative project initiated by the Kansas City Jewish Museum of Contemporary Art (KCJMCA), which will include exhibitions at Urban Culture Project’s Paragraph Gallery (A Potluck Smorgasbord; March 18-May 7, 2011) and KCJMCA’s Epsten Gallery at Village Shalom (March 20-May 15, 2011).  With this project, the traditions, rituals, structures, and conviviality of the dining room become a platform for the exploration of issues such as hunger, sustainability, public health, consumption, the origins of food, its history of cultural symbolism, and its ever-evolving role as a vehicle for communication, community-building, and creative expression.

The participation of artists, designers, historians, scholars, educators, planners, farmers, gardeners, activists, chefs, caterers, foodies, foragers, and other creative people of all kinds is invited. Each exhibition will center around a 16-foot dining room table, created by artist Peter Warren.  At and around these tables a series of participant-driven activities, events, and meals will unfold. Proposals are invited for multiple aspects of these exhibitions, including: THE HARVEST (at Paragraph): soliciting, collecting, organizing, displaying and/or otherwise considering the canned goods and other non-perishables to be gathered on behalf of Harvesters food bank; THE TABLE (at Paragraph): the creation of individual place settings, to displayed on the dinner table and appropriate for use;  THE SMORGASBORD (at Paragraph + Epsten Gallery): activities of all kinds to take place during the course of the exhibitions that relate to, are inspired by, and/or will center around the dining room table, including lectures, discussions, presentations, demonstrations, workshops, temporary installations, live performances, readings, potluck dinners, off-site excursions, etc. Submissions of personally, culturally, or creatively significant recipes and/or personal photographs or videos of memorable dinners and dining-related activities and experiences for public display in THE KITCHEN (at Paragraph) are also invited.

Click here to download the complete call for proposals and participation, including much more information about The Dining Room Project. Proposals are due Tuesday, January 25, 2011.

Curated by artist Caleb Taylor, A Glimpse Inward presents a group of artists whose works offer commanding views into explorations of the body, science, media, and psychology.  Featured artists are Rollin Beamish (Bozeman, MT), Lori Hiris (New York, NY), John Douglas Powers (Birmingham, AL), Caleb Taylor (Kansas City, MO), and Chris Turbuck (Bozeman, MT). The show opens Friday, January 7, 6-9pm, at la Esquina, 1000 West 25th Street, a Charlotte Street Urban Culture Project venue. An Artists Talk follows on Saturday, January 8 at 2pm, featuring special presentations by Rollin Beamish and John Douglas Powers.

Through autobiographical comic books, kinetic sculptures, videos, and paintings, these artists investigate the use of “inner” structures as both literal and metaphorical platforms to generate meaning. The exhibition establishes the act of looking as a conceptual focus, with voyeurism, or the “pleasure of looking,” as a key component to how these artists gather material and create an aesthetic.

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See video of A Glimpse Inward.

The Missouri Bank Crossroads Branch, 125 Southwest Boulevard, will debut four new large-scale commissioned images, by Lawrence, Kansas-based artist Jerry Kunkel and Kansas City-based artist Adolfo Martinez on its Art through Architecture “Artboards” in time for First Friday December, 2010.

Jerry Kunkel‘s two west-facing images, titled Memories Are…, play with ideas of fact and fiction, past and present, the nature of memory, and the veracity of photographic representation.  Juxtaposing the front and back of a postcard against two views of the specific location it apparently depicts, Kunkel invites the viewer “to fill in the blanks, conjure a short response, and consider what may have transpired.”

Adolfo Martinez’s east-facing Artboards, titled We’re Not in Kansas Anymore, feature robots pulled from pop culture set amidst the Kansas City skyline: Robby the Robot, from the movie “Forbidden Planet,” Gort from “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” and robots from “Lost in Space,” “March of the Robots,” Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis, ” and a B movie called “Robot Monster.” While injecting a sense of humor and fantasy into the downtown landscape, this line-up of visitors from different eras and planets also offers a poignant portrait of changing cultural portrayals of the futuristic “other.”

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Read the article in The Kansas City Star

Read the article in The Vignette

On Friday, November 19, 6-9pm, Urban Culture Project hosts PAGES: Book as Medium, Catalyst, Venue at Paragraph gallery (21 E. 12 St.).  Curated by artist Amy Kligman and featuring work by 40+ artists, the exhibition celebrates the diversity of thought, process, and experience that can be revealed or inspired via book.  All of the artists in this show draw inspiration from books in some way, and as a collection the work demonstrates the potential of the book in artmaking, as a subject, tool, material, and or/springboard for other work.

For some artists in the show, the book is an inexpensive, unpretentious venue that one can carry anywhere and work on at any given moment.  For others, it is appreciated for its relationship to story and narrative, or for its nature as a multiple, to be published and distributed widely.  Still others use the book as raw material to carve or sculpt, fascinated by its capacity to reveal secrets one page (or layer) at a time.  Some see the book as a record of facts, used to document process and discoveries. PAGES features the work of artists from the Kansas City area and around the country, including emerging as well as established artists. As part of the exhibition, Paragraph will include a “reading room” of work shown in a library-like setting, where visitors will be encouraged to engage in browsing artists’ books, sketchbooks, and zines.

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Read the review in The Kansas City Star

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Opening Friday, November 19, 6-9pm at Urban Culture Project Space (23 E. 12th St.) is a multimedia exhibition exploring conceptions of the self, and featuring works by emerging Kansas City-based artists Luke Pretz, Abbe Findley, and Terry Campbell. The opening will feature an evolving, collaborative performance and artist remarks at 6:30pm.

With this project, these three artists investigate themselves, and specifically the manner in which their projected or externally-oriented representations of self relate to and blur with their internalized senses of self.  Much of this blurring, and the consequent ambiguity relative to the notion of the “true” or “real” self, can be seen as product of contemporary media/technology, via which one is constantly in the process of (re)constructing and projecting one’s “self”, as well as accessing and processing others’ self-projections via shared images and actions.  The exploration of these dynamics and how they relate to the forging of personal identity and lived reality are central to these artists’ works.

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Read the review in The Vignette

In neighborhoods from coast to coast, fallen rap heroes like Tupac Shakur, Notorious B.I.G and Big Pun are immortalized in painted murals. Using visual arts to honor hip-hop’s dearly departed, Hip-Hop is Undead —a one night, free event on Friday November 5, 6-10pm at la Esquina, 1000 West 25th Street, KCMO—unites the feel of those organic, street-art tributes with a traditional, Dia de los Muertos-style celebration.

Hip-Hop is Undead, curated by Phil Shafer, aka Sike Style, will combine all four elements of hip-hop. Shafer has commissioned over a dozen Kansas City artists to contribute works in mediums from sculpture to spray paint. Featured will be pieces by Jason Sierra, James Ramirez, Amanda Zeitler, Jeremy Madl, Daniel “Lucid” Bartle, Phil “Sike Style” Shafer, Shannon Moore, Luke Rocha, and Two Tone Press. In addition, the event features DJ Ataxic on the turntables, a special performance by the Tiger Style b-boy crew, and an interactive graffiti wall. Viewers are invited to participate by lighting a candle or placing an offering on a memorial altar and, for those wishing to add to the ambiance, come dressed up as your favorite ghost of hip-hop’s past.

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City Center Square and Urban Culture Project present “Panoramic Postcards,” a window installation by Lawrence/Kansas City-based artist Judith G. Levy. To remain on view for approximately one year, the installation was commissioned by City Center Square for its south-facing window on 12th Street, just west of Main, through an open call to artists facilitated by Urban Culture Project. The installation relates to the United States Post Office located within City Center Square, specifically taking the idea of the picture postcard as inspiration.

Judith G. Levy’s installation features four large-scale digital images resembling old panoramic postcards, which are mounted on Sintra and suspended within the window space. The images are composed from elements extracted from an array of historic picture postcards, recombined and reconfigured to “evoke a new look at the past and arouse some questions about the present.” Like much of Levy’s work, these deceptively picturesque images blur fact and fiction toward investigating broader social and cultural issues and revealing larger truths.

As part of this project, Levy will distribute free sender-friendly-size panoramic postcards several times over the course of the installation, including on Monday, October 18, from 11am to 5pm, and on Wednesday, October 20, 11am-5pm.

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Read the review in The Kansas City Star

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Read the article in The Kansas City Jewish Chronicle 

Read the article in Midwest Voices

Kansa Citta Pueblita,  an exhibition of new work by Kansas City-based artist Maria Calderon, presents the community of Kansas City as a pueblo or tight knit community, “where the people, the places, and the atmosphere exist in a unique balance,” writes Calderon. It opens at Urban Culture Project Space, 21 East 12th Street on Friday, September 17, 2010, 6-9pm, with artist remarks at 6pm and a performance of traditional Andean music by the Andean Express at 9pm. It runs through November 6.

Calderon presents the Kansas City community from her own singular perspective, and in relation to its seasons, permanent and temporal fixtures, nature, architecture, transport, and diverse population. Included are a fantastic array of Kansas City icons and local characters, including local artists, who many viewers will immediately recognize. Featuring vivid colors and patterns, works include a large-scale burlap painting installation composed of many parts, a series of paintings on paper, and a brand-new sculpture.

Read full press release. Watch a sneak peak video of Maria Calderon preparing for her exhibition.

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Read the review in Review

You Complete Me, opening at Urban Culture Project’s Paragraph gallery, 23 East 12th Street, on Friday September 17, 6-9pm,  is an exhibition of interactive audio and video installations by HACK.ART.LAB, a Wichita-based disciplinary collective comprised of artists, programmers and engineers. Members are Ann Resnick, Kristin Beal-DeGrandmont, John Harrison, Ivy Lanning, Lauren Hirsh, and Tom McGuire.  The show runs through November 6.

You Complete Me explores relationships between viewers and technology, and the role that cooperation plays in creative endeavors. Viewers are invited to be active collaborators in the creation of several interactive audio and video installations, which present infinite possibilities and enable viewers to share authorship as they influence outcomes. From Ghost in the Machine, which plays with viewers’ temporal and spatial perceptions through a series of live, recorded and delayed playback using a webcam, Pd and a tv; to June, Kristin Beal-DeGrandmont’s self-lit, modular, kinetic, relief sculpture that references the cinematic experience of riding in the car along Kansas highways—the works by this multi-talented collective promise to create an immersive environment appealing to audiences of all ages and backgrounds, actively involving viewers in a process of learning and discovery.

Opening weekend also features Sneak Peak Under the Hood: An Open House Event, Saturday, September 18, 12-5pm, where Hack.Art.Lab and special guests, the Computer Cowtown Congress (CCCKC) hacker space, will teach visitors about the technical side of their projects through workshops and demos.

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