The goblet or chalice has a long history filled with mysticism, power, and ritual. At its core, a goblet is defined as a footed vessel intended to hold drink. However, the common understanding of what a goblet is expands beyond its function to its inherent symbolism relating to ceremony and opulence. Playful or traditional, the artists in the exhibition offer their interpretations of the goblet’s history and form. The exhibition includes over 50 ceramics, glass, and mixed media works. Purchase awards totaling up to $2,500 will be offered. The public will also have the opportunity to vote for their favorite goblet.

The exhibition includes work by Joel Pisowicz, Gina Pisto, and Logan Reynolds and is the culmination of their artist residencies at the Belger Crane Yard Studios. The past year has been one of growth and change for the artists and the exhibition is a reflection of the “passing moments” experienced during this pivotal time in their careers. Passing Moments explores nostalgia, memorial, and how objects present a view into the past.

While styles and techniques are unique to each artist, all three delve into themes of memory and the passage of time in their practice. Joel Pisowicz refers to monoliths with his austere, vertical sculptures. His forms and aesthetics pay homage to the post-industrial environment of his blue-collar upbringing. Gina Pisto creates sculptures referencing still life, flora, and domestic space. Pisto meditates on how objects are imbued with memory and emotion, transforming them into metaphorical portals to the past. Logan Reynolds’ familiar yet distorted domestic objects use humor to explore intergenerational relationships and value systems. Collections of cartoonish items referencing popular culture and consumer products are treated equally with “nostalgic fondness” and ambivalence.

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.

Ammy McCollum | Entangled Ecosystems

September 6 & October 4 | 6 – 9pm

Ammy McCollum identifies as a queer visual artist and illustrator who creates work that tells the stories of unique characters and personalities found in nature. Elements of her work are fantastical, but they are built on a foundation of realism. Her work is for people looking for a connection to nature around them. The art takes the viewer on a journey of interconnectedness; exploring compelling and complicated relationships inherent in the natural world. By focusing on our local natural resources she hopes to bring them into the vibrant light of awareness, appreciation, and inspire curiosity about the world outside of four walls.