Artist Statement
My work has been shaped by my background growing up in a rural community in Iowa. Industrial farming is a common practice in Iowa. It wasn’t a world that I was quite a part of until I began working as a mower at an industrial hog farm during the summers when I was in college. Growing up in Iowa, I was taught from a young age about agricultural practices and where our food comes from. There was a general knowledge of industrial farming in rural communities even without working on a farm. I worked on an industrial hog farm for four years mowing their operations. My work depicts my experience working around industrial hog confinements for four summers in Iowa. I navigate this industry in my work through my memories, through the things I saw and experienced. I focus on the things that impacted me. This collection of work depicts the workings of industrial hog farming and the complications of operating a large-scale farm. Much of this is not seen by many. Through my work, I shine a light on the realities of an industry that are usually invisible.

Bio
Sadie Goll was born and raised in eastern Iowa. She studied printmaking at the University of Iowa and received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2019. She completed her Master of Fine Arts at the University of Kansas in 2022. Throughout her undergraduate and graduate career, her work has been focused on industrial hog farming and her experiences with the industry as she grew up in Iowa. She works in a variety of printmaking techniques such as lithography, intaglio, relief, and monotype.

My artwork explores my passion for native plants of the tallgrass prairie and acts of cultivation, in the context of ecological crisis. My mixed media studio paintings comprise playful, emergent, and responsive layers of printed and painted botanical forms, combining multiple material processes, to suggest the many simultaneous systems and relationships active in the natural world. It is my hope that my paintings, with their shifting language and saturated color, can create dynamic worlds where wildflowers come in and out of focus. In these works, vitality and entanglement are prioritized over traditional compositional resolution, in an attempt to bewilder the viewer and decenter the human perspective of the natural world.

I often spend my nights awake, anxiously thinking over the current and coming ecological challenges, reading and listening for new paths forward. My days follow a joyful curiosity about these wonderful indigenous flowers. My artwork dwells in this paradoxical intensity as both a requiem for the lost prairie and an incantation for hope.

I also create public-facing artwork in the Flowers for Marlborough Project. This project confronts and attempts to impact urban blight in the Marlborough neighborhood of Kansas City, MO by interjecting large-scale paintings of native plants on neglected and abandoned properties. In addition, I have conducted free workshops and host native plant seedling give aways to the community.

Julie Farstad was born and raised in Elmira, New York. She earned her BFA in Painting at the University of Notre Dame and her MFA in Painting at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Farstad is a Professor of Painting and Social Practice at the Kansas City Art Institute. She lives and works in the Marlborough neighborhood of Kansas City, Missouri with her husband and two sons.

Berman’s abstract images follow their own alluvial logic from the inside out; as fragments build, plates collide, and colors accrete. Time and space prove the strength found in softness and the solidity contained in transparency. Collectively, the works in this exhibition depict a pause in time, a reflection of unconformity.

Laura Crehuet Berman is a Spanish-American artist who creates images that layer time, space, form and color together. The natural world inspires her, and there is a focus on play, improvisation, and relational dynamics in her work. Berman has created site-specific exhibitions and exhibited her print work in over 150 exhibitions at galleries and museums around the country and internationally. Her prints are widely collected and she has made commissioned work for a number of institutions and public collections.

Please join us for a solo exhibit of new work from Kansas City artist Emily Cramer. In Reverberation: Faith in Motion, Emily invites viewers to contemplate elements of faith such as courage, love, perseverance, and discernment through works with intimate details and dreamlike perspectives. Using images of water and ripples, Emily invites us to consider the ways our faith is not just our own: each act of faith belongs to the broader body of believers, where it ripples outward, carrying with it a witness of the divine source of all beauty and wonder.

In my artistic practice, Billie S. is not just a subject but an integral part of my creative process. Billie S. serves as a catalyst for working through the past, finding liberation, healing, and self-assurance, a fearless persona within me that frees me from self-criticism and embraces every part of who I am. For the past four years, I have created this work in the basement studio of my home. This exhibition marks the first time much of this art has been presented to the public. It feels especially fitting to present this work in the basement of my second home, the Leedy-Voulkos Art Center. 

-Debbie Barrett-Jones

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