Studios Inc is pleased to present Lilly McElroy’s solo exhibition titled, “I Will Destroy You.” on view September 8th through October 21st, 2023.

The artistic projects Lilly McElroy pursues are a reflection of her complex relationship with the American West. They explore what it means to be an American in a time of diminished expectations. Working as a lens-based artist, she utilizes the landscape symbolically to address issues of power, gender, and eco-anxiety.

Exhibition hours: Wednesday through Friday from 10 – 4pm and Saturday from 12 – 4pm and by appointment

Location: 1708 Campbell Street, Kansas City, MO, 64108

Featured image: 

The artist in front of her work “The Monolith”.

An opening reception will be hosted on Friday, September 8th from 5 – 8 pm.

Lilly McElroy will host an artist talk on Saturday, September 9th from 12 – 1 pm.

I Will Destroy You will be on view thru October 21st.

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“You are standing in a landscape. Maybe it is a pasture, or maybe it is the lakeshore on a summer evening, or maybe it is the top of a mountain, the wilderness past the end of the trail, but whatever this place is, in this moment, it feels safe. It feels stable. Then it doesn’t. All at once, there is dread and melancholy. You are here, waiting for an inevitable end. It is coming, you are grieving, but at least this place is pretty.

I will destroy you.

It’s natural to make photographs while you wait for the inevitable. Photography captures light and freezes time. It is an attempt to preserve the fleeting. For this exhibition photographs of the setting sun were made by McElroy using a 4 x 5 film camera. She then irrevocably altered the negatives, using her fingernail to scratch away the image of the sun. This action is small yet devastating; the anxious picking at a scab that leaves you with a lifelong scar. The sun, the very thing whose light makes the photograph possible, has been gouged out of the negative, the printed picture rendering this absence not as erasure revealing blank paper, but as the ominous birth of an angry black void. McElroy’s hand is directly linked to this destruction as the sun becomes a meteor, dark and crackling in the sky, a malevolent yellow nimbus dancing around it as it hurtles toward the surface of the earth, toward you.

In her monolithic works the sun is a dark orb that hovers over a bucolic field. It no longer emits energy or light; it only absorbs and you are standing in front of it. The innate silence of the photograph now presses down on the landscape. The rustling of the grass in the wind, the susurration of the insects in the field are cut off, and you can only hear the sounds of your own breath. McElroy made these images in the darkroom, laying negatives directly on top of light sensitive paper. With the press of a button, light flashed through the negative and struck the paper, chemically altering its structure. This transformation signals a shift, an irrevocable change, a violence that has been enacted and can’t be taken back.”

I Will Destroy You. will be on view thru October 21st.

In Nest: A Collection, we invite you to witness selections of artist Jenna Bauer’s work from 1999 — present. The exhibition includes several distinct styles that have emerged in her work over the years, such as meditative landscapes, abstract process paintings, color grid explorations, and conceptual works. The exhibit also includes reflections of the artist’s daily life, such as a poignant checkerboard installation of to-do lists from the period of time when she was a caregiver for her father. Nest offers an intimate glimpse of the evolution of an artist’s life and work as she has moved through time, and the results range from restrained and thoughtful to joyful and energetic, creating spaces of respite for all who engage them.

I don’t think of my paintings as documentation, but rather an inspirational starting point for a painting. Edward Hopper said, “What I wanted to do was to paint the sunlight on the side of the house.” That quote captures my intent perfectly. I’m looking for a composition that makes me want to paint. I feel I have done that with this series of paintings. I feel that this is my strongest body of work I have completed over my many exhibition. –John Ferry, 2023

John Ferry’s recent paintings continue his lifelong inspiration and love of architecture and the built environment. The cities, that he has explored, from Detroit to Rome, are the catalyst for Ferry’s painted investigations of color, light, texture and space. Forgotten or overlooked urban spaces, such as alleyways or fire escapes, are shown in exaggerated vertical formats that express the very character of what is being depicted. This extreme format emphasizes the gesture of light and the narrow slice of sky between buildings emphasizes the tension of space in the city. Ferry’s use of format, as an essential design element, is equally successful in the long horizontal paintings of the mid-century modern Farnsworth house. Format and composition are paired in a variety of ways in the paintings of Rome. The Colosseum in Rome was the perfect subject to illustrate the grandeur and permanence of architecture shaped by the passage of time. In the Colosseum paintings, color and texture define light and shadow and the beauty of decay.

John Ferry is a Professor serving in the Illustration Department at the Kansas City Art Institute. Straight and Narrow is his 20^th one-person show. John Ferry’s paintings are in the permanent collections of The Wichita Center for the Arts, KS; Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS; H&R Block, KC, MO; Negro League Baseball Museum, KC, MO; Federal Reserve Bank; KC, MO; and others. John Ferry lives and paints in Prairie Village, KS with his wife Amy and two daughters Katherine and Paige.

This exhibition is a sample of ongoing discoveries within two separate themes. Thinking back on almost a half century of image-making there is diversity in what interests my heart and eye. The word beauty has been a central theme from the beginning. It may be an out-of-date word, but I will stick with it. Beauty elevates the soul and describes the inner state of being in a place of wonder. I have always looked for subject matter that has an inherent sense of rising above its commonly recognizable form and that lifts me to a place of deep satisfaction. I respond to things that are often in plain sight, yet possess a “WOW” factor that comes by looking intently and allowing the subject to reveal its inner beauty. Photography, for all its innate documentation, has the potential to carry us into a place where reality begins to border on another realm, where the unintended beauty of the subject actually becomes something very special. It is more than just what the eye sees, it is where the heart engages in things that words can only play with.

What struck me about the pairing of grain facades and quarry environments was that both subjects are easily recognizable yet offer that window of higher potential. Neither silos nor quarries are made for esthetics. They aren’t intended to be visually appealing; they are intended to serve a function. Yet I believe that both offer more. I became interested in quarries and grain facilities in the early 1990s. They were just part of my ongoing discoveries as I sought significant subject matter.

I remain active in making images, I think in part because I have remained inquisitive and love the positive pursuit of the elusive, always looking for something to reveal its potential. In a sense, I go out to take images; but maybe more importantly, they have come to me. It’s as if there is a space inside of me, kind of like a room, that loves to collect scenes of unintended beauty.

-Michael Schultz