“your majesty.” is an exhibition assembled by Jackob Graves concerning the condition of lovesickness. Through a camp mimicry of Gaelic love rituals and trophy hunting, sculpture and painting inquire into the edges of desire that it imitates. Angels, horse-girls, organs, and unicorns all perform as actors within an art installation in the search of the perfect love, the true love.  Ultimately, “your majesty.” grasps towards a destination it can’t reach; it stagnates within its own la douleur exquise, or exquisite pain, romanticizing itself as it crystalizes; melts; bleeds out; taxidermies and hangs itself on the wall. Anything it could do for you, your majesty.

Growing up in an environment that stifled creativity and discouraged independence, I struggled with self-doubt and trauma from a legalistic father and a religious cult that shaped my formative years. My art now explores themes of suffering and healing, as I navigate the long-term effects of abuse and rejection. Creating art as therapy has helped me process much of the pain, acknowledging that the void my father has left will never be filled by anything or anyone.  This journey has taught me the value of living authentically, confronting fears, and embracing discomfort. As I expand into new mediums like fiber, sculpting, and repurposing materials, I’m determined to master skills once deemed outside my reach, proving to myself that I can shape my future on my own terms.

Using traditional art media with contemporary practices such as installation and performance, this exhibition is an uncanny depiction of a truck stop situated in the heart of the Great Plains. Attached to the truck stop is a karaoke bar that some refer to as “The Versailles of the Midwest.” Focusing on blue-collar life in America, the installation creates a fantasyland that gives the viewer relief from the monotony of a 9-5.

Is This Real Life? is an exhibition of ceramic sculpture by Ben McCarthy.

Periphery is a thought-provoking exhibition that showcases a harmonious blend of film photography and sculpture, transporting viewers to a tranquil realm of contemplative spaces. In a world where AI-generated art is increasingly prevalent, Burke and Comotto's use of analog film is a deliberate nod to the beauty of the authentic and the imperfect. Straddling the line of furniture and sculpture, Kirkwood utilizes the forms of familiar and nostalgic objects to inform an abstracted vision of what furniture is and can be, challenging traditional notions of furniture and functionality. Merry Sun's installation serves as a sculptural aperture, framing an array of visual and sonic perspectives. Wielding the porosity of sound, her work utilizes sonic feedback to dissolve place into space by blurring the edges of adjacencies. 

Periphery aims to examine the beauty of imperfection and grace in the unpredictable. By embracing the anomalies that occur within more traditional forms and processes, we find a connection that feels more acutely human.

FEATURED ARTISTS

Merry Sun constructs compositional infrastructures in her sonic sculptures. These physical and semantic systems delineate permeable spaces that facilitate interaction between individual subjectivities and their surroundings. Wielding the porosity of sound, her work utilizes sonic feedback to dissolve place into space by blurring the edges of adjacencies. Sun received her MFA in Sound Art from the Visual Arts Department at Columbia University in New York City. She currently resides in Kansas City, Missouri.

Colin Burke utilizes common errors of traditional film photography to create ethereal and atmospheric images that transport the viewer to a place of calm and reflection. Through the unpredictable and chaotic nature of film dust, light leaks, and overprocessing, he curates and designs impressionist landscape photography and gives a second life to film anomalies that would otherwise be discarded. Burke received his BFA in photography at the Kansas City Art Institute. He often cites Uta Barth and Hiroshi Sugimoto as heavy influences on his work. He works as a full-time graphic designer and brand innovator in Kansas City, Missouri.

Jason Comotto explores the relationship between objects and accumulated narrative; stories that exist beyond something’s functional role. The combination of travel and set building aims to uncover layered stories, each unique to collective memory. Comotto received his BFA in photography at the Kansas City Art Institute. He currently works and resides in Kansas City, Missouri.

Mitch Kirkwood straddles the line of furniture and sculpture. Utilizing the forms of familiar and nostalgic objects to inform a more abstracted vision of what furniture is and can be. Through craft and honing of raw materials veneer of delicacy is given to otherwise mundane items seen outside the context of furnishings. Kirkwood received his BFA in Sculpture and Creative Writing at the Kansas City Art Institute. He currently works as a furniture designer and fabricator in Kansas City, Missouri.

Hiraeth (noun.): a deep yearning for something, someone, or somewhere. A homesickness for a home you cannot return to, a home which maybe never was, the lost places of your past, and a home you have never been.

What is a home? For someone struggling with homelessness, it’s a roof over their head. For someone thousands of miles away from their homeland, it may be the familiar scent of a childhood meal. For those in an abusive relationship or a chaotic household, home is somewhere they find peace and calmness. Home might mean friendship, connections, and communities for those who recently relocated.

This exhibition invites the audience to redefine the home concept with the artists. While feeble and potentially fruitless, each artist uses their chosen medium to visualize an ideal home. Some pieces interrogate the cruel irony behind homes curated by realtors and interior designers as our community struggles with a worsening housing crisis and homeless epidemy; some capture the brief moments of peace and tranquility that “felt like home.” Some pieces explore space-making in architecture and structure; others collage tokens from their past into sentimental memorials.

With participating artists of different age groups, ethnicity, immigration status, and sexual orientation, “Hiraeth: A Feeble Attempt to Visualize a Home” interrogates the multiple elements an individual requires to feel at home and how the reality is such as the struggle for many: BIPOC, queer, minority, and low-income community members struggle with affordable housing, equal housing opportunities, and accessible resources; personal and collective memories, as well as histories and cultures, are lost during massive re-developments and gentrifications; migrants, diasporas, and immigrants struggle with lacking senses of belonging in the Midwest, especially suburban and rural midwest.

What is a home?

The name "A Reasonable Woman” is intentionally satirical to highlight the abrupt difference between society’s portrayal of an ideal or reasonable woman, and the conceptual woman being proposed by Morgan and Malone’s work.

The title coincides with the late 1800s concept of a vilified “public woman” versus the idealized domestic “true woman”, and is intended to contrast the hyper-pink, maximalist, over-the-top nature of the installation.

Malone and Morgan critique this polarizing concept and allow modern women to ask themselves where they fit into this contradictory spectrum.

Ultimately, who is a Reasonable Woman?

Cooking W/ Leftovers is a sculptural interpretation of the act of piecing one’s life back together. A reclamation of what time has stolen, this show examines the grievances and relics of past selves reconstructed with meticulous intent.

This exhibition is inspired by a play on the word vestibule: the threshold to an entrance of an interior reality, and the vestibular system: that which creates a sense of internal balance within the body.

Nell Hull:

"My work is the proof of my existence confined in this earthly body and an exploration into what it means to suffer and celebrate being human. I have more recently begun to explore textiles as a way of softening my art practice. I am excited to pair my textile creations with my ceramic work for the first time in this exhibition."

Alison Krenzer:

"My work explores the binaries of attraction and repulsion, femininity and masculinity, and disgust and desire. While seeking to blur the line between the two distinctions, I aim to confront viewer's own notions about desirability and beauty."

Izanna Perry:

"My current work explores the connection between the body and how our emotions physically manifest themselves in our bodies. I try to imbue a sense of childlike whimsy and dread in my sculptures by taking inspiration from my own anxieties, childhood memories, and forms in nature."

“If I Don’t Laugh I’ll Cry” is a reflection of a lost childhood with the lens of an adulthood spent cultivating grace. Through the animals of the artist’s life they explore where their sense of relationships, peace, and joy were formed during their formative years that were shadowed by loneliness and neglect. This body of work is a celebration of enduring optimism in hopelessness that coats nostalgic memories.

Butter & Oil examines the relationship between consumption and daily ritual (both public and private) and their presence in our daily lives. Installation-based and sculptural pieces explore the architecture of routine, attempt to quantify the physical setting for those routines, and question if habit and comfort create intimacy between us and our households. The pieces in this show dissect every-day objects and present them for scrutiny, questioning the inherent value of those items.

The Intensity of Being Alive explores the unseen emotional aspects of experience. Themes of fear, alienation, isolation, detachment and obsession can be found with the work. The ways in which we self manage, the undeniable patterns of our behaviors which we must recognize. Intangible aspects of experience come to fruition, showing the complexity and contraindications within ourselves. The ways in which our minds affect and transform the world we perceive. 

Welcome to the estuary--a multimedia installation where we can all gather collectively to create an inclusive environment around art, science and education. Ambient Occlusion is a month-long foray into conservation, exploration and the joy of discovering something new. We'll be hosting talks, zine and biomaterial workshops and a drawing party so mark your calendars!

My personal interpretations of topics such as identity, memory and place are what drive the majority of my work. I draw connections between these broad ideas and my own unique experiences as a Syrian-American primarily through painting and printmaking. My source material comes from investigating and researching my peoples history as well as my own upbringing through childhood photographs and images of a land I haven’t embraced in over a decade.

My perception of homeland, specifically the Middle East, had been greatly affected by my American upbringing, causing me to view it as a backwards and destructive place. However, through the process of unlearning and reevaluating these superimposed stereotypes of the Middle East, I start to reclaim those ideas and manipulate them. This process results in images that call attention to Western intervention in the Middle East, and simultaneously present a more nuanced understanding of my identity. Consequently, I’ve used my limited yet newfound understanding of Syria and the Middle East in general, married with my American upbringing and childhood photographs, to develop a vocabulary of symbolic objects in which I repetitively integrate into my spaces.

Additionally, I tend to paint my spaces in a way that mirrors my privilege as an American born Arab. My vibrant color palette might seem peculiar, but I purposefully stick to this vibrancy to reflect on my privileged life and the safer environment that I grew up in, contradictory to those whom I share my other half with. I create this work to come to terms with who I am, and to embrace the fluidity and instability of my identity. I also see my practice as an opportunity to recover my origins and reevaluate what I know or what I thought I knew about myself and the place my family came from.

I’m Jasmine Rodriguez, a current senior at the Kansas City Art Institute, majoring in Photography and minoring in Entrepreneurial Studies in Art and Design. My first introduction to photography was my senior year of high school. There, I learned and fell in love with the tactile process of shooting, developing, and printing film and images in the darkroom. At the time, a nature preserve was implemented behind my high school, allowing me to photograph the flowers that had bloomed. While the flowers were pretty, I continued the trend of using flowers in my work, the meaning of the flower changing as I changed.

My work at the moment includes elements of self-portraiture, flowers, and mirrors, along with the base elements of light and shadow. Using minimal and familiar elements in my work allows my subconscious to reveal itself within the images. I tend to work in the mode of make now, think later, meaning that I work solely based on intuition. It is during my downsizing and printing phases of my process that I start to dissect and give context to the images. This project is a visualization of a personal mindset. The darkness in the images are the “mind”, and I present my body in ways that depict movement throughout the mind. In most of the images, I’m interacting with my reflection in a large mirror, longing to be one with it. The flowers in the mirror are presenting an ideal situation, mindset, or something similar. The images that depict my body laying amongst the flowers shows full envelopment of the mindset, embracement and/or acceptance of it, or fighting to not be overtaken.

Ramifications is an exhibition of selected works of Avery Jade and Stephen Homer. Avery and Stephen are BFA candidates at Kansas City Art Institute whose works explore the intersections between humans, nature, and our constructed environments through the mediums of clay, printmaking, fiber, and photography. As studiomates they have been in constant dialogue for the last two years about ideas and techniques, sharing material explorations and creating related but individually unique styles that marry well in conversation with each other.

Avery is interested in how global society has never before been so interconnected personally, culturally, and economically. That overwhelming rage or sorrow or helplessness that one might feel after reading the news is grief, we are mourning our notions for how we think the world should work. Avery is exhibiting wall tiles that explore the grief within the intersection of our urban environments and our natural world. Other works on view include a sculpture reminiscent of mountains that explores resource use and management, a large hand woven rug crafted on a hundred year old loom while in Mexico, and a linocut octopus print inspired by Minoan pottery. 

Stephen’s works include an installation of planted ceramic pylons that explore the persistence of nature within our urban spaces, a large sculpture of a human head that is encrusted with coral and algal forms, a moon jar with textures inspired by cliff faces and shale deposits, a sculpture combining elements of terrestrial plants, fungus, and aquatic life, a large sculptural piece investigating the degradation of our cities, waste and resource usage, and a free hanging sculpture inspired by a visit to the local Kauffman Memorial Garden and the plants within. In addition they will exhibit a series of abstract photographic prints which utilize intentional camera movement and digital layering of domesticated and wild plants and sub/urban landscapes.

for dear life is an image series about a desire for maternal control through photographic means. This work makes visible anxiety with my son’s aging and burgeoning independence. These images depict maternal conflict with the understanding that time persists, even as one attempts to stop it.

Angela Shaffer is a photographer working to bring visibility to hidden aspects of mothering. In doing so she explores the psychology, vulnerability, and banality of motherhood. Her work has been featured in exhibitions with Serchia Gallery (Bristol, UK), Ortega Y Gasset Projects (NY), Woman Made Gallery (IL), The Artist/ Mother Podcast (TN), The University of Iowa (IA), and the Sheldon Galleries (MO). Angela was a Finalist for the Palm Photo Prize 2022 and she was a 2021 Critical Mass Finalist with PhotoLucida.

Angela (b. 1983, Pennsylvania) received her B.S. in Art Education from Asbury University and was a High School Art Teacher for five years in Garrard County, KY. She currently lives in Columbia, MO where she is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the University of Missouri’s School of Visual Studies. 

AUTHORIZED HUMANS is a showcase of studio residents. With a range of work including mixed media large scale drawing, discarded object collage, styrofoam painting, and large scale photography, this selection of work offers a glimpse into the creative lives of ten local emerging artists.

2big2fail is an exhibition of new work considering the influence of private investment management corporations on American culture and infrastructure.

Since the beginning of the Covid quarantine in 2020, I have been deeply inspired by my experiences at home with my two “pandemic pets.” Up until the pandemic, I was creating large-scale, feminist portraits of women, showing them how they wanted to be seen. Then, during the year 2020, the social, racial, and political unrest in the world, coupled with quarantine, made me want to find beauty and peace in my immediate surroundings. My partner and I rescued two puppies that year, and those puppies shaped my quarantine experience. The paintings for this exhibition are intimate portraits that show the confinement of the pandemic, but also the comfort, joy, and relief that my home, partner, and pets provided me. As the pandemic progressed and spending time outdoors was encouraged, I cherished going on walks and to parks with my dogs. Thus, my paintings shifted from indoor to outdoor settings, much like our collective pandemic experience. Spending time with my dogs helped me cope, and the act of painting them aided in that as well. This exhibition aims to encourage discussion on what helped others get through this traumatic time, and in turn creates a collective healing experience.