“CRAFTED WORLDS –

BETWEEN LIGHT AND SHADOW”

Mixed Media Works on Paper by

Golfam Jozdani

April – May ’25

Golfam Jozdani’s series is inspired by the game Minecraft. In this game, each player can create their parallel world with extraterrestrial forces and unlimited resources. This world features many positive and negative characters. Her passion for depicting this world and its characters through art led to the creation of this series.

Her constant concern for creating a parallel world, one that her inner self is always seeking, fueled this excitement and passion. If she cannot protect the pure and positive characters or defeat evil in reality, she can create their characters side by side through her art.

This creation aims to bring about peace, turn inequality into equality and justice, and transform every wickedness into beauty. Golfam aspires to create peace and equality in her parallel world and show people that instead of being bad, we can be good, accept differences, and live with love.

2011 Baltimore Ave, Kansas City, MO 64108
+1 – 844-202‑9303 | info@cerberagallery.com

Enjoy visiting with the artists of Studio Above and viewing all their work. Artists Nancy Clay, Vanessa Lacy, Noelle Stoffel, William Rose and Jackie Warren all work at the studio. A new addition to the studio is Kim Ansari. Her art consulting business, Perennial Places, features different artists during the year for viewing pleasure and purchase.

View Recent Acquisitions to the Studios Inc Residency Collection from artists in residence in 2023 and 2024. Including works from Harold Smith, Kate Clements, Hadley Clark, JT Daniels, Leon Jones, Caleb Taylor, Casey Whittier and Hong Chun-Zhang.

Also come see Studios | 2025, featuring works from Studios Inc Artists-in-Residence in 2025 — including works from Kate Clements, Hadley Clark, JT Daniels, Leon Jones, Caleb Taylor, Casey Whittier, Melanie Johnson, Armin Mühsam, Peregrine Honig, and Hong Chun Zhang.

Open April 4th, 2025, from 5 – 8 pm.

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.