WONDER WALL

Works of Art

$500 or Less

First Friday, December 1, 2023 11 – 7 pm

exhibitions runs through January 27, 2024

Open to the Public

Thursday – Saturday 11 – 4 pm

CLICK TO VIEW WONDER WALL 2023

It starts with a creative impulse.

There is the allowing of nothing to become something

It proceeds mark by mark, shape by shape, color by color.

There is the merging with the rhythm and following the lead of what wants to go where.

What is inside and invisible is now outside and visible.

Artist Statement

I have been drawing, painting, collaging, designing, and stitching since childhood. Elaborate sand castles were the first source of inspiration. 

My art journey has been characterized by experimentation with process and materials and the search for a compelling communicative visual language. I have often felt as if I were a witness, watching my hands create something from nothing, then compelled to breathe as much life as possible into whatever has revealed itself.

Bio

Jason Pollen is an internationally acclaimed artist, designer, and educator. He has been on the faculty at the Royal College of Art in London, Parsons and Pratt in New York City, and Professor and Fiber Chair at the Kansas City Art Institute. He is Professor emeritus at KCAI, President emeritus of the Surface Design Association, and an American Craft Council Fellow. His work is in numerous prominent private national and international collections, including the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art.

Pollen had designed numerous collections of textile designs for Channel, Dior, Yves. St. Laurent, and Jack Lenor Larsen. He also created sets for the Kansas City Ballet.

Exhibition Statement

Scars to Stars is an exhibition of Dylan Mortimer’s work over the last several years. This body of work aims to stand in the tension between trauma and healing. Employing symbols that have been traumatic in his lived experience being born with a fatal respiratory disease and receiving two double lung transplants, he aims to transform and recontextualize those symbols. Scars, IV poles, cells, ambulances, and surgeries become beacons of hope and joy testifying both the darkness and the hope simultaneously. The aggressive joy rendered in layers of glitter evoke the absurd faith of hope in seemingly hopeless situations.

Artist Statement 

The symbols that collide in my work fuse anatomical, biological, and medical imagery with spiritual and religious themes. Shiny materials invoke the Baroque as a way of navigating a deadly diagnosis. My whole life has been an attempt to spread glitter over a seemingly hopeless situation. I aim to reference and navigate my own despair, transformation, and joy. It is my own leap of faith.

My work employs shiny, glowing, vibrant materials to evoke a transformation from a deadly disease I was diagnosed at birth. The transformation aims to provide a glimmer of hope in seeming hopelessness.

A variety of materials are used, from glitter suspended in resin, to lights, to colored glass. The aim is to collide a variety of discoveries into a contemporary manifestation of the baroque. Acknowledging pain and challenge, while simultaneously recognizing hope to overcome.

Time is a Circle: Generational Craft Practices, includes the work of Mona Cliff, Wansoo Kim, Hùng Lê, Jada Patterson, Jason Wang, and Aleah Washington.

The public is invited to the exhibition’s opening reception from 6 to 8 pm. The exhibition includes work by Mona Cliff, Wansoo Kim, Hùng Lê, Jada Patterson, Jason Wang, and Aleah Washington, and runs through February 3, 2024.

For centuries craft practices have been passed from generation to generation keeping traditions alive and preserving history, while building communities through the making process. These shared practices are a testament to the resilience and perseverance of many cultures throughout the world.

The six artists in the exhibition use craft traditions to carry on generational practices while unearthing aspects of their own histories within a broader historical and artistic context.

Mona Cliff is an Aniiih, Nakota, and Eastern European artist whose beadwork and fabric applique are the foundation of her practice and heavily based in generational knowledge. Hung Le combines textile traditions with photography to examine his family history in the backdrop of the Việt Nam War and their immigration to the United States. Material culture and personal histories are at the center of Jada Patterson’s work. Using braided sweetgrass, Patterson references ritualistic healing and imparts power onto the mundane object. Wansoo Kim uses traditional ceramic Korean vessel forms and unorthodox ornamentation, to invite viewers to consider the revealed and the hidden, the internal versus the external. By embellishing the inside of his vessels, he reminds us to examine what is beyond outward appearances. Jason Wang draws on his Chinese heritage to create functional ceramic vessels that revolve around experiencing community. His textured teapots, cups and saucers, are intended to create a sensory experience that invokes a strong emotional response to further dialogue about identity, mental health, and mindfulness. Aleah Washington explores identity, environment, and community through her abstract wall hangings and functional ceramic work. She shares personal memories and reflects on shared histories using bold color on her quilted wall hangings and stitched pattern designs on her ceramics.The artists in the exhibition demonstrate a command of craft and a deep understanding of their role in safeguarding craft traditions and histories.

A native New Yorker, Terry Winters graduated from Pratt Institute in 1971, focusing on painting. Through the 1970s, while studying nature, especially molecular level life forms, Winters honed his craft as a drawer and a painter until he was ready for his inaugural exhibition in 1982 at the prestigious Sonnabend Gallery. Later that same year he began his first foray into printmaking at Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE) on Long Island. Winters became one of the leading printmakers in the U.S. At first, he was leaving his Manhattan studio one day a week to work with the master printers at ULAE, and that later escalated to up to four days a week. As art historian Richard Axsom wrote in “The Philosophers’ Stone: The Prints of Terry Winters:”

Printmaking is a forum whose procedures and collaborative protocols have allowed Winters to explore the expressive nature of his drawings. For an artist whose cardinal subject is protean form, printmaking encourages a changing image through the various proofing phases that lead to an editioned print. A print reflects a progressive history of alterations. It is a record of mutation, an accumulation of discrete changes that has no exact counterpoint in drawing or painting.

Over the years, Winters’ paintings, drawings, and prints have been featured in major retrospectives at the Boston Museum of Fine Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Irish Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.