VanderKaay engages both material
and metaphoric sensibilities—the
terrestrial and the celestial, interwoven and inseparable.
—Julie Wills
KANSAS CITY
“/spek-tr m/ variance of
sculpture and form”
Studios Inc
The best group shows spark conversations between artworks, revealing
new dimensions and offering fresh
insights. “/spek-tr m/ variance
of sculpture and form,” which showcased works by many of Kansas City’s
best-known sculptors, did just that.
Studios Inc is a nonprofit studio complex and residency program located
just east of KC’s Crossroads Arts
District. It maintains a collection
consisting of works donated by
resident artists as a condition of their
three-year tenure. Studios Inc’s
associate director, Robert Gann, drew
from these holdings for “
/spek-tr m/.” A Minimalist aesthetic dominated the show, many works
evidencing an aura of quiet self-con-tainment and an attraction to
domestic and landscape references.
All of the featured artists make the
selection of materials a key part
of their work. May Tveit’s chosen
material is wheat straw, bundled
into prickly blocks and encased in
solid hues of plastic hard-coat
paint. Frosted Flakes (2009), a wall-mounted display of three blocks
painted in blue and yellow, exudes
an attitude of renegade Mini-malism. The color both muffles and
emphasizes the work’s relationship to
the cereal-producing agrarian landscape around Kansas City.
Ceramic tile, including the small
hexagons used for bathroom floors,
is Brett Reif’s material of choice. In
Froth Worship (2015), a molecular
arrangement of spherical forms, he
puts tile in the service of a curvy,
organic aesthetic that evokes human
body parts and excretions. The
squiggly Kinky Main Squeeze (2014)
suggests a length of intestine. Reif’s
strong clean forms found their
counterpart in Jill Downen’s four
plaster-covered Breast Blocks (2010),
displayed on wall-mounted shelves.
Resembling the onion domes of
Russian and Mughal architecture,
these miniature temples mediate
between ancient fertility cults and
the breast fetish of contemporary
mass culture. Architecture is also a
touchstone for Matthew Dehaemers’s
Water Drops (2012), a birdhouse-like
wooden structure stacked with illuminated bottles of colored water
in jewel-like hues, and Colby Smith’s
Navah #21 (resurrection) (2016), a
quiet geometric abstraction created
from discarded construction materials and paint.
Marcie Miller Gross has worked
with felt for years, offering soft
versions of hard-edged Minimalist
staples. Cut and Sheared (2011), a
horizontal stripe painting reimagined
in industrial felt, takes us back to
the woolly animal source of its tactile
gray expanse. Solid #1 Cantilever
(2013), which consists of two blocks
made from colorful strips of felted
sweaters, invokes the bodies of former wearers.
Dylan Mortimer’s Pneuma (2012)
takes its title from the Greek word
for breath, an allusion to his lifelong
battle with cystic fibrosis. Studded
with light bulbs, the wall-mounted
sculpture of curving, yellow-painted
aluminum arrows pointing every
which way radiates hope and faith.
Tanya Hartman’s Prayer Paddles
introduced another moment of ritual
into an exhibition otherwise
weighted toward the everyday. Fitted
with thread-wrapped handles, the
paddles are emblazoned with intri-
cate painted designs incorporating
typed entreaties, such as “Dear Lord
God Please allow me to treat all
people with dignity.” Hartman’s plain-
tive tone contrasted with the head-
on pronouncement of Beniah
Leuschke’s Pay Dirt (2012). The cut-
out letters of the two words domi-
nate a lower expanse dotted with
iridescent disks, reflecting Leuschke’s
ongoing interest in wordplay and
inscrutable relationships between
parts.
Incorporating two taxidermy deer,
Davin Watne’s Life is a Collision (2008)
carried a particular resonance on
a February day when the news was
filled with reports of a plane hitting
a deer. As if to protect against this
very kind of incident, Watne mounted
car mirrors on the antlers of the male
deer, which stands beside his female
mate, as if posing for an animal kingdom version of American Gothic.
He’s a survivor—one mirror frame
holds only the cardboard backing.
—Alice Thorson
CHARLOTTETOWN, PRINCE
EDWARD ISLAND, CANADA
Rachel Beach
Confederation Centre of the Arts
Much discussion about the history
of 20th-century sculpture has
focused on its emergence from under
the shadow of painting. With
Minimalism’s return to the object,
the conversation with painting
suddenly seemed irrelevant. Yet, as
with so much in art, conversations
never truly end, they evolve and
spiral in new directions.
The work of Brooklyn artist Rachel
Beach appears, at first glance, to
be a manner of painting in three-dimensional space. But her recent
exhibition, “Mid-Sentence,” which I
first saw in Halifax at the Saint Mary’s
University Art Gallery, offered a conversation about paintings as objects,
and the history it cited is, of necessity, more complex than the translation of Modernist ideas from two to
three dimensions, a strategy that
marked so much sculpture from the
first half of the 20th century.
Beach thinks simultaneously in
painterly and sculptural terms, which
became clear in “Mid-Sentence.” The
works were arranged together on
plinths of identical area (though of
varying heights), usually in groups
of two or more, evenly spaced in a
familiar Modernist grid. Movement
was integral to the experience of
the works; as viewers navigated the
grid, their changes of position created multiple, shifting viewpoints
that denied stability. Beach’s intent
is to unsettle expectations of these
objects as art (are they painting
or sculpture?) and as objects in the
world (how do they stand? what are
they made of?). Each one is painted
Davin Watne, Life is a Collision, 2008.
Taxidermy mount and mirrors, dimensions variable. From “/spek-tr m/.”
