Kansas City-based artist Barry Anderson presents four, short, single-channel HD video animations: Nightrover, Junk Yard, Lawn Ornaments, and Treebeasties (1). This collection of animations is quirky, humorous, and offers slightly unsettling glimpses into fantasy worlds culled from popular culture and collaged together in wackily delightful, lushly colored, non-linear vignettes. The camera offers vantage points that alternate between a birds-eye or a snails-eye perspective—from beneath tall grass, through dense forest, below big sky—that affords the onlooker a voyeuristic positioning. Anderson places the viewer within magical natural and constructed environments, each populated with Americana: vintage coquettish characters, cartoon animals, and tourist destinations. This lacing of iconic symbols of material culture at first may read as nostalgia; however, the assemblages bring forth a rich narrative that unfolds in time to reveal a sublime underbelly that works to locate the videos within a perplexing fairy tale setting— alluring and unnerving, at once.

An exclusive program at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, project screen presents video art by contemporary artists working regionally, nationally, and internationally. The video series rotates monthly in the Museum’s lobby, presenting the work of 12 artists each year. The artists selected for the series present compelling aesthetic gestures, experiential visual thought, and both narrative and non-narrative explorations through their innovative investigations into an ever-evolving “new” media.

ARTIST BIOGRAPHY: Barry Anderson was born in Greenville, Texas, in 1969 and currently lives and works in Kansas City. He creates visual art in a wide range of media, including video animation, photography installation, and sound art, that have been presented nationally and internationally. With concentrations in photography and digital media, he received a Bachelors of Fine Art from the College of Fine Art, University of Texas, Austin, Texas, and a Masters of Fine Arts from the Henry Radford Hope School of Fine Arts, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. Anderson is Associate Professor, Department of Art and Art History at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Anderson has had solo exhibitions at Marty Walker Gallery, Dallas, Texas; Walter Maciel Gallery, Los Angeles, California; ISIS Gallery, University of Notre Dame, South Bend, Indiana; Light Work Gallery, Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York; Review Studios, Kansas City, Missouri; and Byron Cohen Gallery, Kansas City, Missouri. His work has been included in many group exhibitions: The Big Reveal: Recent Acquisitions, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri; European Media Art Festival, Osnabrueck, Germany; Emblazoned Ciphers: Artists From Kansas City, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Nebraska; Between Thee and Me, Kansas City Jewish Museum, Leawood, Kansas, and Greenlease Gallery at Rockhurst University, Kansas City, Missouri; Video‘ Appart Dubai, Dubai, United Arab Emirates; and City One Minutes, Expo 2010, Shanghai, China, among others. Anderson’s work is in the permanent collections of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri; the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, Kansas; and the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York.

Opening Reception:    Fri  May 4 | 6 – 9 PM
Dance Performances: Fri  May 4 | 6 – 9 PM

Artist’s Talk: Sat May 5 | Noon – 1 PM

The Studios Inc Exhibition Space is pleased to present <<Se opp for Rotenmannen>>, an exhibition featuring resident artist Peter Warren, on view from 05.04.12 to 06.22.12 with an opening reception Friday, 05.04.12 from 6:00 – 9:00 PM.

In Warren’s current storm of creativity, he is dismantling his studio and creating art out of everything for the upcoming exhibition, <<Se opp for Rotemannen>>.  The show will include a broad range of work including installation, sculpture, two dimensional works and a performance by Trina Thompson Warren to create an all encompassing experience.

With “process” at its core, Rotemannen searches for strands of what was, what is, and what will be….an experiment to link both the chaotic and focused realms of his world. – Peter Warren

Peter Warren is a resident artist at The Studios Inc. The Studios Inc provides studio space, professional development, networking, and exhibitions for mid-career artists in Greater Kansas City.

The Studios Inc
1708 Campbell St
Kansas City Mo 64108

This March, the Bemis Center Regional Juried Exhibition will return to the bemisUNDERGROUND galleries. The exhibition’s juror, Shannon Stratton, chose 26 artists from over 250 submissions, spanning a diverse range of media, subjects and approaches. Three of the exhibiting artists will be awarded $500 and a 2013 exhibition in the bemisUNDERGROUND.

Juror’s Award Recipients: Gina Adams, Garry Noland and Lauren Mabry

Juror's Award Recipient: Garry Noland

Juror’s Statement: With around 1000 artworks to choose from, it was challenging to jury the 2012 Bemis Center Regional Juried Exhibition, but as I spent time with the submissions, certain themes and strengths seemed to emerge across career stages and mediums. The final selections reflect a diversity of experience, disciplines, and materiality with an emphasis on certain shared and overlapping themes.  One cannot draw conclusions about a region and its artists from a juried exhibition, but an atmosphere of disquiet emerged in much of the work. Anxiety underlies constrained and precarious forms, tangled marks, impassive landscapes and apprehensive bodies. Meditative patterns reflect on heritage and place. A balance is struck between precariousness and restraint, between weight and breath.  The resulting exhibition is one curator’s response to the work being made (and submitted) in a region. Perhaps it expresses a more widespread, contemporary disquiet that permeates practices outside the Midwest, and outside visual art.

About the Juror: Shannon Stratton is an artist, writer and curator from Chicago, Illinois. She is a founder and current Executive and Creative Director of threewalls, a not-for-profit residency and exhibition space in Chicago. In 2010, Chicago’s Newcity Magazine named Stratton one of the top five most vital people in the visual arts and last year the Chicago Tribune named her a “Chicagoan of the Year.”

Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts
724 South 12th Street
Omaha, NE 68102

Peter Warren: Elvis has Left the Building
March 2 – 31, 2012 Wednesday through Saturday 11am to 6pm or by appointment

Opening reception: 6 to 10pm Friday, March 2, 2012

There is no doubt that his raw materials, compulsively collected and amassed here, are pieces of junk: broken bits of outlived heirlooms; half-buried casualties of technology’s war on analog machines.  Yet this is no junkyard.  And Warren’s works are in no way polished treasures whittled from the piles of another man’s trash.  What Warren builds are mechanisms of resurrection, enlivened monuments of rust, soot, mud and dust—captured at their moment before total extinction, to stand for, celebrate in a way, the melancholic beauty inherent in abandonment and decay.  They are the figures, sculptures and landscapes of Peter Warren’s manufactory.       – Caleb Scott

Peter Warren: Elvis has Left the Building

Peter Warren is a graduate of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.  Since 1997, Warren has worked as a technical/collaborative artist with the Trisha Brown Dance Company, The Wooster Group, Collapsible Giraffe, Accinosco, Gale Gates et al., and Combustive Motor Corporation.  In 2002,Warren worked with choreographer Ming Lung Yang to create an interactive set design for an evening-length piece for Dance Forum Taipei. Warren’s work has been shown in New York City,Des Moines,Iowa, and in Kansas City, Missouri. Warren is currently a resident of  The Studios Inc in Kansas City.

My work is not about making sense of the past or finding clarity for the future. I find the satisfaction and necessity of pattern within the delicate balance between chaos and order.  My goal is to let my instinct guide and inform my process and to allow the materials to find their own voice.  – Peter Warren

The Late Show Gallery
1600 Cherry
Kansas City MO 64108
816.474.1300

DATE:        Wednesday, February 22, 2012
TIME:         5:30 P.M. – 7:30 P.M.
RSVP: urbancoregrouprsvp@gmail.com $20.00 Guest Fee Payable at Door (Guest and Membership fees can now be paid by debit/credit card at the door!)

The Urban Core is a grassroots effort dedicated to learning more about how urban pioneers are preserving and enriching ourKansas Cityexperience.   Each month we gather to discover and learn how new projects and redevelopment efforts are revitalizing our urban core.   Join us at this great location to discover a place that truly contributes to the vitality of our Urban Core.

This 51,000 square foot building located on the east side of the Crossroads Arts District provides studio space, professional development, networking and a 4500 square foot exhibition space for mid-career artists in Greater Kansas City.

Studios Inc

The current building is a hodgepodge of many buildings that have been combined over the years. A three-story brick and stone planing mill and shed was built for P.S. Ford in 1907. Then in 1924 a factory building designed byKansas Cityarchitect Von Unwerth was constructed and attached to the original 1907 structure. Finally the property was modified in 1965 by the Estrin Construction Company and again in 1969 for the MO-KAN Chemical Company when two one-story additions were added to create what we see today.

The arsenal of mediums I employ is vast–from water, wood, steel, bread, to fiber and murals that at the onset one might not see the shared relationship among my various projects. In reality, upon a little deep investigation there is a great consistency that weaves my many art installations together. Inspired by aspects of history, contemporary issues and community life, his goal is to make art that operates on different levels of audience engagement. On arts writer has said, Dehaemers places a great deal of importance on the transformative forces of culture, history, and place. My work addresses issues that are social, economic, and environmental, from the global water crisis to telemarketing and the progression of Alzheimer’s disease. My goal is to make art that operates on many different levels in a way that people can be involved in the process allowing everyone to have a relationship with the art form.

www.matthewdehaemers.com

In my photography practice, my predominant focus is my self-portrait series that is created in either the context of my own community or by inserting myself in camouflage or costume into other subcultures. The images experiment with a clash between the extreme and the mundane, and often reference images in both art history and pop culture. They use humor as a tool to question contemporary etiquette and cultural stereotypes in these various contexts, and to connect disparate parts of the community through visual collisions.

www.dontyoufeelbetter.com

Pedestrian activity along with investigative process is the point of departure from which I begin my work—it is the genesis of my visual voice.  The people, places and objects I observe and photograph are the reticent hosts and clue-makers that make up my work.  Their images generously and unwittingly provide descriptors of presence, of movement, of relationships and an ensuing memory of being (here) and having been (there).  The tapestry-like structures I work with are not only compiled from photo fragments but are dependent upon strategic reorganization, re-contextualization and repetition of the reduced sized images that make up each piece. The resulting imagery transitions and resonates an underlying abstraction layered within pattern, color, texture and topographic strata.

www.mikibaird.com/