Please come and experience the textile works of Nathan Ford, ” When the Morning Comes”

These Quilt like fiber works in reference to growing up queer in the Midwest at the decline post industrial period. Referencing both true Americana and community as well as high contrast of experiences of home life and identity.

Show opens Friday Nov. 3rd, from 4pm ‑7pm

I work in two series. The first reflects my life in Missouri. My mom’s family has been in the Kansas City area for generations. Although I grew up in Northern California, I spent at least part of each summer in the Midwest. Every time I left I had a deep longing for its intimate hedgerows and big skies. The eventual decision to permanently relocate was an obvious one. My roots here are deep and the landscape is the landscape of my heart. It is the wellspring for my current body of work.

Two figures continually appear in these images, that of myself and that of my dear friend, Lissa. We have known each other a long time, having met when we lived in the Bay Area. Each of us serendipitously moved to the Kansas City area at around the same time and reconnected. This body of work takes our likenesses to explore the complexity of life in Missouri, from draconian post-Roe trigger bans to the softness of a more earth-based lifestyle.

The second series is an affectionate parody of rock art. Each painting adapts a classically driven technique to likenesses of contemporary musicians and their song lyrics. These paintings explore the durability of fame and culture by removing pop icons from their proposed zeitgeists and re-contextualizing them in the unexpected quiet of the natural world.

I start each morning in the studio, sitting on a sofa looking out big glass doors to the southeast, overlooking a field of mixed grasses with a small spring fed pond in the center. The pond is a constant, but different every day. Sometimes the wind blows across, rippling the water. When it’s still, the water is reflective. It freezes, sparkles in the sun and thaws. Eagles fly over nearly every winter day. In March a cacophony of migrating blackbirds come in droves, migrating, looking for food, landing on the cattails that surround the pond. Ducks land in droves in the evenings. Many deer come across nearly always west to east, a hawk family hunts every day. The field greens up, frogs start singing, an occasional coyote passes by. In late summer the prairie grasses rise and begin to turn, sunflowers bloom, winds shift, migrations begin again.

In this way, all my work emerges from the pond in the field.

– Jane Booth

Jane Booth built her studio on the rural Kansas prairie sited to overlook the landscape and sky that inspire her. Booth paints from the inside out, from her meditation of life experiences then out, through the physical activity of pouring, pushing, and brushing paint. Her painting begins with raw canvas on the floor of her studio or outside on the concrete, where paint and water can be poured, pooled, and pushed with a broom. The atmosphere of the painting begins with color, vast and saturated or thinned and fog like. A calligraphy of gesture akin to dance informs the composition. Only later, once the canvas is up on the wall, do gestures and forms emerge evolving in conversation forming a visual language that is Booth’s alone. Large scale paintings are the norm for Booth often ranging upward of 15′.

Jane Booth’s paintings are in public collections throughout the country including: Kansas University Hospital, Kansas City, MO; Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Cisco Systems, H& R Block World Headquarters and Hilton Hotels, as well as the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art, Sedalia, MO.

Join us on first Friday, November 3rd from 6 to 8pm at the Belger Glass Annex (1219 E. 19th Street) to see regional glass artists Ryan Kepler and Kayla Ohlmer team up to create a collaborative piece of glass artwork with the Belger Glass Annex team. The demonstration will blend both glassblowing and glass sculpting techniques.

Ryan Kepler’s artwork aims to create a sense of curiosity and wonder in the viewer by referencing nature, natural materials, and natural phenomena while exploring the relationship between light and space. Kayla Ohlmer’s self reflective work explores the human tendency to experience the world how we want to rather than the way it is. Kepler and Ohlmer both currently work at Tulsa Glassblowing School.