PLACE:       The Studios Inc

                         1708 Campbell Street         

                         Kansas CityMO64108

DATE:        Wednesday, February 22, 2012

TIME:         5:30 P.M. – 7:30 P.M.

*RSVP to 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.

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.

Studios Inc: 2011

Gallery Hours
Tues – Friday   10 – 4 PM
Saturday          12 – 4 PM     

The Studios Inc Exhibition Space is pleased to present Studios Inc: 2011, an exhibition featuring resident artists Barry Anderson, Julie Farstad, Andrea Flamini, Archie Scott Gobber, Marcie Miller Gross, Diana Heise, Beniah Leuschke, Dylan Mortimer, Garry Noland, Colby K Smith, Peter Warren, Davin Watne, and James Woodfill, on view from 12.9.11 to 2.17.12, with an opening reception, Friday, 12.9.11, 6 – 9 PM.

Studios Inc: 2011, an annual exhibition, features work by each resident artist and serves as an introduction to The Studios Inc Corporate Collection Program. Through this program, The Studios Inc makes available an exclusive collection consisting of one piece of work from each of The Studios Inc resident artists. The Studios Inc is eager to begin promoting the Corporate Collector Program and help fuel corporate patronage of the visual arts community, along with increasing exposure for The Studios Inc resident artists. The Studios Inc underwrites the cost of an independent curator to assemble the collection.

 In her show “Concentrations,” Marcie Miller Gross works almost exclusively with heavy gray felt, as seen in this wall piece, “Sheared #1.” Photo: E.G. Schempf

If patience is a virtue, then Marcie Miller Gross and her audience should be handsomely rewarded.

Gross’ work is a study in stamina and the subtle delight that a tidy, orderly world manifests.

In this show at Studios Inc.’s exhibition space, where she’s been a resident artist for several years, Gross’ industrial gray felt installation is a fitting companion to the gallery.

The gray floors, walls, and ceilings in this voluminous space are oppressive, and here Gross’ immaculate fiber work actually seems to lift the space, to suggest its rightness as a gallery.

While working almost exclusively in gray felt for this exhibition, Gross does include several minimalist drawings and some works incorporating lush, creamy-white felt and white military blankets.

In “Working Parts (wedges, blocks, slabs),” we are led through a field of felt and wood objects displayed on a long table. These components embody Gross’ ongoing interest in opposites: mass/void, large/small, soft/hard and absence/presence.

In her larger wall pieces, the dominant gray felt squares, rectangles and other hard right angles shape our experience of the gallery and the relationship of each work to the other.

Heavy gray felt inevitably suggests German artist Joseph Beuys’ work. Beuys prized the material for its ordinariness, the warmth that felt provides, its flexibility and its personal mythology.

Gross, on the other hand, revels in the material as a measure of spatial relationships rather than for its more liquid effects, configuring it into grids and patterns. The pieces are methodical, balanced and severe in their restraint and reliance on relational proportions.

She cuts the felt on a variety of band saw blades, causing tufts in the fiber that she exploits for their surprisingly mammalian effects.

Gross works these tufts into furry ridges that suggest human hair or animal fur. The tufted gray felt adds a gentle humanity to Gross’ sedate and overtly formal explorations of space and geometry and softens the edges of “Sheared #2 (shift)” and “Sheared #1 (alternating).”

“Untitled (blankets)” is the most animate and anomalous of Gross’ quiet work in this exhibition. Stacked four deep and softly draped over the edge of a shelf, the blankets suggest comfort and presence, or at least the presence of absence.

The blankets offer a sensual and sensory moment in an otherwise rigid exhibition defined by tight organization, right angles and measured spaces.

While Gross’ work, in some aspects, may remind us of Ohio artist Ann Hamilton’s monumentally expansive installations and fiber’s vast possibilities, Gross’ work is, instead, an accumulation of smaller moments, movements and relationships.

But just when you think that Gross’ work is too austere, she smartly produces subtle touches in the pieces that bring us back to our physical selves and our infinite and essential relationship to fiber.

On exhibit:

“Marcie Miller Gross: Concentrations” continues at The Studios Inc. Exhibition Space, 1708 Campbell St., through Oct. 21. Hours are 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Tuesday- Friday and noon-4 p.m. Saturday. Call 816-994-7134 or go to http://thestudiosinc.org.

The Studios Inc Exhibition Space is pleased to present Concentrations, an exhibition by Marcie Miller Gross, on view from 9.9.11 to 10.21.11, with an opening reception, Friday, 9.9.11, 6 – 9 PM and a gallery talk on 9.10.11 at 12 PM.

Concentrations is an exhibition of drawings and sculpture that examine elemental, abstract form. Through an accumulative means of building with industrial felt, this work explores the visceral, visual relationship of physicality and weight, of balanced measure and subtle form.  These solids are poetic and repetitious, animal and mineral, dark and absorbing. 

Miller Gross has exhibited her work extensively including: Dolphin Gallery, Cranbrook Art Museum, Byron Cohen Gallery of Contemporary Art, Salina Art Center, and a solo exhibition at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. Collections include: American Institute of Architects/Kansas City, Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, Missouri Bank, Helix Architecture and Design and many others.  Her work has been reviewed in Art in America, Sculpture, Art Papers, I. D Magazine, Review, and Kansas City Star, and received many awards including the Charlotte Street Foundation Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts, and Arts KCFund Inspiration Grant.  She received her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art and has held academic appointments at the Kansas City Art Institute and University of Kansas. 

Gallery Hours
Tues – Friday  10 – 4 PM
Saturday            12 – 4 PM

Gallery Talk
Saturday 9.10.11 12 PM

The Studios Inc exhibition is at 1708 Campbell, Kansas City, MO 64108.

In the ambitious exhibit “Consumer Foreplay,” Davin Watne’s paintings, installations and sculptures take the subject of over-consumption to a new level.  If Watne’s dark and theatrical paintings recall the dramatic, heroic painting styles of such 19th-century artists as J.M.W. Turner and Eugene Delacroix, his flamboyant and deliberately garish sculptures would be at home in the Folies Bergere. In this show, Watne wants to have his cake and eat it too — his work ranges from the glamorous to the deadly — and for the most part he succeeds.

Watne’s sculpture, “Consumer Foreplay” incorporates colored leather, hand-carved legs and arms, beads, hosiery, hair and butterflies. The artist says the butterflies “represent the pollination of consumer products that both attract and threaten to overcome us.”

Watne’s art has often focused on the subject of collisions, especially the violence that occurs between the natural world and that of the technological.

In “Consumer Foreplay,” he circles around the emotional and moral battles people wage as they are caught between a culture that demands immediate gratification and the resulting environmental and human rights costs.

Using materials such as feathers, jewelry, sequins and stockings, he assembles gaudy objects to represent the seductive marketing strategies of contemporary advertising. In “Piston” and “Mt. Vernon Street Walker,” he spills these ultra-feminine accessories from opened purses in abstract displays of erotica. The messages sent by these works are too ambiguous; they resemble everything from feminist statements from the ’70s to the most gorgeous of party arrangements.

The exhibit’s title piece, “Consumer Foreplay,” however, is a masterpiece of fetishism.

For this glorious rococo sculpture, Watne cut and sewed elongated swaths of different colored leathers that simulate giant designer handbags, from which emerge hand-carved legs and arms groping themselves. Attached are beads, hosiery, hair and butterflies in a titillating tangle of the crassest of materialism.

“The butterflies,” Watne says, “represent the pollination of consumer products that both attract and threaten to overcome us.”

Across the room, in a yin-yang spin, are three paintings of nautical disasters in which airliners and tankers are sinking or have disappeared. With a nod to Theodore Gericault’s “Raft of the Medusa,” in “Fantasy, Reality, Bureaucracy” a tiny figure on a raft struggles to survive hurricane waves under which a ship’s goods have sunk to the bottom of the sea. “Transnational Interrupt” is a surrealist depiction of a floundering plane and boat at sea.

As published in KC Star

The largest, most minimal and mysterious of the paintings is “The Only Thing to Hold on To,” in which a lone cooler or container floats in the darkest of waters. This work has a real sense of the tragic. One of the powers of these paintings is that they can be interpreted in a variety of ways, particularly given the current climate of ecological and man-made disasters.

Separating these two distinct bodies of work are towers of hair extensions. Murder and theft are now associated with the huge demand for such products, but their function here is somewhat mute.

In “Snow Mound,” a large corner installation in which a shopping cart has crashed into simulations of snow piles, Watne offers an ironic take on one of the most recent consumer catastrophe/collisions: a winter with so much cold and ice that shoppers were kept at bay.

The activity of acquiring, Watne’s art insinuates, entails choices, and those choices entail costs, many of which we refuse to acknowledge.

On exhibit:“Davin Watne: Consumer Foreplay” continues at Studios Inc. Exhibition Space, 1708 Campbell St., through June 24. Hours are 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Tuesday-Friday and noon-4 p.m. Saturday. For more information, call 816-994-7134.

A selection panel consisting of a variety of individuals from the Kansas City area is assembled and convenes; it is this selection panel that determines which applicants will be awarded the three studio spaces in 2012.

Residencies are open to all visual artists. The Studios Inc does not discriminate on the basis of age, ethnicity, gender, economic or social standing, political or religious beliefs, marital status, sexual orientation, or artistic expression.

With six years behind us, our goal of promoting and providing the tools and resources to the most promising mid-career artists in our area has been extremely successful. Our three-year studio program continues to have major impact, within our local community and on a national and international level, promoting Kansas City as a leader in the visual arts.

Friday, May 6th, 7pm
Leedy-Voulkos
2012 Baltimore Avenue
Kansas City, MO 64108-1914

Celebrate the launch of America: Now and Here, Kansas City, on First Friday, May 6th, in the Crossroads Arts District with a live performance by audio-visual installation artist and mix-master extraordinaire DJ Spooky and DJ Sheppa (of Nomathmatics).

America: Now and Here presents a cross-disciplinary experience in visual art, poetry, music, theater, and film as the foundation for engaging audiences in a unique American experience. Through art, people will come together for timely dialogues about America, sharing their insights, ideas, and points of view. Through the America: Now and Here experience, everyone can participate in an exciting national conversation and contribute to this historic American journey. While in Kansas City, America: Now and here will present innovative and exciting programs in the heart of the Crossroads Arts District as well as a series of co-sponsored events with cultural partners throughout the city.

The Studios Inc resident artists Archie Scott Gobber, Beniah Leuschke, and Dylan Mortimer will be exhibiting along side artists Eric Fischl, Jasper Johns, Jeff Koons, Jim Leedy, Robert Rauschenberg, Cindy Sherman, Kiki Smith, Chuck Close and many more. Curated by former resident artist David Ford, the exhibition will also include former resident artist May Tveit and Studios Inc Patron and newest member of our Board of Directors, Mike Lyon.

Additionally, resident artist James Woodfill has been commissioned to design and fabricate the interior of the “Pop up Shop” located at the Leedy Voulkos Art Center.

Jim Woodfill's Pop-Up shop in progress

For additional information: http://kansascity.americanowandhere.org/

Tues – Friday 10 – 4 PM
Saturday       12 – 4 PM

Gallery Talk

12 pm Saturday May 14, 2011

The Studios Inc Exhibition Space is pleased to present CONSUMER FOREPLAY, an exhibition by Davin Watne, on view from 5.13.11 to 6.24.11, with an opening reception, Friday May 13, 2011 6 – 9 pm.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0EPXuQZEtM

CONSUMER FOREPLAY is Davin Watne’s second solo show at The Studios Inc Exhibition Space. This exhibition will feature new work from 2010 and 2011, including paintings, sculptures and installations. Through his current work, Watne is exploring the idea of attraction and how it works in the marketplace.  He is interested in consumer products that are marketed to enhance our appearance. Watne uses these products as the raw material to create sculptures that mimic seduction, courtship and procreation as seen in our culture. This work creates a visual language to unpack the rituals of seduction, found in both the plant and animal world, to celebrate desire and find a deeper understanding of our biological yet at times, salacious behaviors.

Davin Watne received his BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in 1994 and is currently working toward his MFA at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. He has been awarded several grants, awards and public commissions including The Charlotte Street Foundation Award, ArtsKC Inspiration Grant, Avenue of Arts Municipal Arts Grant, Art in the Loop Public Arts Grant and is a resident of The Studios Inc. Residency Program.

Hours:

• 10am-4pm Tuesday – Friday
• 12pm-4pm Saturday
• 6pm – 9pm First Friday of each month as well as Exhibition opening night
• The Studios Inc exhibition is at 1708 Campbell, Kansas City, MO 64108.

Performance and Opening Reception, Friday 3.11.11, 6 – 9 PM

Gallery Talk on 3.12.11 at 12:00 PM

Take Only What You Can Give is the second solo exhibition by multi-disciplinary resident artist Diana Heise at The Studios Inc Exhibition Space. This show includes four new bodies of work from 2010 and 2011, including a series of videos, sculptural installations, photographs and a performance. Each work tackles ideas surrounding violence found in contemporary society, in order to highlight the fragile resilience of life. Through her work, Heise creates a visual language that engages the grotesque and the beautiful to address the effects of fear and domination. Her aim is to encourage catharsis, healing and sensations of freedom.

The title piece is a sculpture and participatory performance aimed at cultivating contemplation of the link between people and the environment. Three performers will lie on a reclaimed wood sculptural platform, covered by hundreds of pounds of local red clover seeds. The audience will be invited to take handfuls of seeds, asked to take only what they can be responsible for cultivating.

Diana Heise’s work has been exhibited in galleries and festivals internationally, including at the Brooklyn Museum, the Film Anthology Archives, Soho20 Chelsea Gallery, New York, NY. She is a recipient of a Performance Art Fund Grant from the Franklin Furnace Inc as well as a Presidential Fellowship at the American University in Cairo. She has spoken about her work in venues such as the Parsons School of Art and Design, the H&R Block Artspace and the Kansas City Art Institute.