For the past ten years, Four Chapter Gallery has enjoyed partnering with the Kansas City Art Institute Fiber Department to spotlight the work of just one of their exceptionally talented graduating senior class. This year, they will celebrate artist Erica Alexander.

In Prepare a Table, Alexander focuses on slow, repetitive processes including hand stitching and natural dyes that invite both the artist and viewer to pay attention and draw near. Her intricate fiber works and sculptures deal with themes of community, reciprocity with nature, and traditional craft passed down from mother to daughter through generations.

Alexander dyes her fiber with organic materials she has either found or grown during the summer months. Each items finds meaning as she recognizes the places she found each item as well as the history behind each piece of material. She notes there is a beauty in seeing the hand of an artist in textiles — tangible evidence of the people who made those items which, in her case, revolve around deliberate process, planting patience and love into the objects. Important to think about — she notes — in a world of fast fashion.

There will be an artist talk on Friday, May 2 at 6:30pm.

Jerry Kunkel’s paintings speak to our individual appetite for self-reflection, born of a collective and universal desire to comprehend, both physically and emotionally, the world around us. He often weaved narratives in a poetic or humorous fashion, sometimes constructing the work with no apparent end in sight, allowing the consequent juxtapositions of images to create a story. His work superimposes original and found imagery with the addition of text as an attitudinal descriptor, or an extra, content-specific image. In addition, the frequent incorporation of the illusion of plywood or other non-precious surfaces adds the element of the everyday and has pervaded his work for years.

Jerry was interested in our momentary reaction to everyday stimuli, that moment that summons a private response – a response that we may not feel compelled to share for a variety of reasons; perhaps because it doesn’t seem important, that our response is not fully formed, or we simply don’t care to think about why we really don’t care. In the end, whatever it is, he would say “trust what emerges and embrace uncertainty.”

Kathy Liao is known for her large figurative works that translate her lived experience and history into colorful, luminous, multi-layered compositions, that often portray herself and family. During the isolation of the pandemic, Liao’s paintings revealed the loneliness and distance of that experience and made it tangible.

In Liao’s newest work, We Met in a Dream, the intimacy of story is mirrored by the intimacy of scale. Liao uses the immediacy of working in a small size to summon stories from her memories, or the trance of a dream, to the poetry of painting and collage. These explorations are full of movement, leaving clues and pointing the way.

“I woke up one day from a dream where my little sister turned into a fly. I reached and grasped for her, to protect her, to keep her safe. I felt deep panic, guilt, and dread. In the moments before waking, I cupped three dead flies and I couldn’t tell which one was her.

I started a dream journaling practice a year ago. Each drawing is a strange affirmation and quiet unraveling of the human drama in my mind. My work exists in the fluid state between experience, memory, dream, and place. In an attempt to translate the fleeting and subconscious, at the intersection of history and time, the drawings shapeshift and settle into allegories of their own.” -Kathy Liao

Biography

As a Taiwanese American artist, Kathy Liao looks for patterns and repetitions that weave through the immigrant families’ experience in her mixed-media work. She is the recipient of various recognitions, including the 2023 Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship, 2022 21c KC Artadia Award, 2020 Charlotte Street Foundation Visual Artist Award, and a public art commission for the new Kansas City International Airport. Her work was shown in galleries and museums in Boston, New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, Kansas City, and many other cities nationally and internationally. As a mentor and educator, Liao lectured and presented at multiple institutions and conferences nationwide. Formerly, Liao was Director of the Painting and Printmaking department at Missouri Western State University. She was nominated “Most Influential Professor” in 2019. She is currently the organizational services program officer at Mid-America Arts Alliance.

$10 Halves examines how memory can simultaneously serve and fail us. In my practice I am investigating what is gained and lost through recalling a memory. The works presented here serve as my attempts to hold on to and solidify some of these fragments as best as I can while also looking at them from a new angle. Because of this new perspective I am able to interpret new meanings from the past, one that is in a constant state of orbiting me. This process of excavation and discovery is present in the work on multiple levels, including the materials used and the processes by which they are applied to the substrates. 

The show will include two dimensional pieces that highlight the fragile nature of the past as well as sculptural works that present different methods of navigating through memories. For example in “Primos” I drew a family portrait in charcoal and then covered it with joint compound. After the joint compound dries I crack off fragments to reveal the image underneath. This process of cracking off the layers highlights the barrier that is between me and these memories and makes for works that develop and change overtime. I use my abstracted imagery of family photos to depict the memory of specific people and locations. In these newest joint compound pieces I have found a process to think about how people fill in “blanks” in their memories. My Exhibition $10 Halves will showcase how I’ve been investigating the forms of memory in my studio practice. 

Artist Statement:

I’m trying to navigate the present with fragments from the past. I work with various materials including tracing paper, joint compound, concrete, charcoal, sound, and video, transforming them into abstract sculptures, wall pieces, and works that slip in between disciplines and memories. I’ve felt the most love from my Dad when he cuts my hair. He taught me how to cut hair in college, and now I feel the most love for him when I cut his, noticing how he closes his eyes in the chair as I shave his head. When I was little my Mom would trace Pokemon characters for me to fill in because I wasn’t confident enough in my drawing skills. Tracing is still a major facet of my practice, as I trace old family photos onto my substrates. I felt the biggest as a kid cruising with my Dad in the Monte Carlo driving down National Avenue, when the music would be really loud and people would look at us, and show love as we passed by. From my archive of experiences I create works that attempt to solidify these fragments but they’re distorted, not as I experienced them initially. There’s a haze to it, the leftover residue that guides me now. 

Artist Bio:

Isaiah Vazquez is a multimedia artist from Milwaukee, WI who’s currently based in Kansas City, MO. Vazquez’s work examines ideas of reverence and maintenance, whether for materials, subjects, and memories. These interests began during Vazquez’s childhood upbringing during which he detailed cars with his Father and colored cartoon characters that his mother would draw for him. Art was a major part of his childhood, spending lots of time at the kitchen table drawing graffiti or various characters from cartoons. 

He was awarded residency at the Yale Norfolk School of Art, and has exhibited at the Lester Goldman Gallery at the Kansas City Art Institute, Runnels Gallery at Eastern New Mexico State University, and is a part of forthcoming exhibitions at the Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art (MO) and 100,000,000 Space (KCMO). He will graduate from the Kansas City Art Institute with a BFA in Painting in the Spring of 2025.

Through a series of deconstructed portraits that I call Non-portraits, I explore different manifestations of “the self” as a means of probing Identity and the Human experience. Some of the larger themes I’m grappling with in these works are notions of death and rebirth, the boundaries between mortality and Eternity, the self and otherness, portraiture and iconoclasm. 

I combine drawing, painting, digital mark-making, sewing, and image transfers from select source material that I manipulate in a layered process that is cyclic. My interest in multiplicity and deconstruction drives me to take my own images apart, to reassemble, rearrange, and recycle them to use as a foundation to build new images. This enables me to explore different iterations of the aforementioned themes, while also reinforcing the cyclic nature of making and the dialogue between and within the works themselves. 

Artist Statement:
I use artwork as a tool to search for meaning — to make sense of myself, the world and the Human Experience. I weave together representational and abstract elements with a range of literary, historical and philosophical references to create narratives with overlapping meanings. This is embodied in my work through a motif called the Non-portrait. The Non-portraits started as a response to two competing impulses I felt to simultaneously reject and participate in portraiture. The Non-portrait is a way of drawing on aspects of my own lived experiences that are contradictory (for example feeling invisible and hypervisible at the same time), while also serving as an archetype with which to explore larger themes that connect to the broader Human Experience. 

Artist Bio:
Askia is a Missouri-based artist who was born in Queens, New York. Working between representation and abstraction, he employs a mixed media approach that combines acrylic, oil paint, dry media, digital media and collage elements to tell stories about the Human Experience. He graduated from Columbia College (Missouri) with a BFA and he received his MFA from the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. Askia exhibits his artwork regionally and nationally. He also holds a Master’s in English and teaches at the University of Missouri-Columbia.