Time is a Circle: Generational Craft Practices, includes the work of Mona Cliff, Wansoo Kim, Hùng Lê, Jada Patterson, Jason Wang, and Aleah Washington.

Throughout time craft practices have been passed from generation to generation, keeping traditions alive, preserving culture and history, while building communities through the making process. The six artists in the exhibition use craft traditions to carry on generational practices while unearthing aspects of their own histories, within a broader historical and artistic context. Stay tuned to our website for more information. This exhibition will be on view from October 6 through February 3, 2024.

California artist Michele Rene is one of the featured artists in the Jones Gallery monthly show, where her pieces “Waiting” and “Miranda” will grace the walls through September.

With over 9,000 square feet of space in the Crossroads Arts District, Jones Gallery is able to host artists from around the nation in their monthly group shows. Michele Rene responded to a call for art and two of her paintings were accepted.

Michele Rene was born and raised in California and grew up in a household that celebrated art and music. From an early age, her subject matter has been people, with an emphasis on the female. “A lot of my girls are made-up characters, imaginary friends if you will, but sometimes I’ll paint a portrait from reference, like Miranda.”

“Miranda” – an 8”x10” acrylic on canvas was painted from a snapshot of a stranger who let Michele Rene take a photo. “When I started the piece, I didn’t even know who she was so I called her Crystal because she works at the metaphysical shop. I later learned her name is Miranda. She’s a stunning redhead with impeccable fashion sense.”

Other paintings of people might be more on the abstract leaning and receive a title connected with mood, such as “Waiting” – a 15”x19.5” acrylic on board.

Rene explains, “There was no reference with this one, except maybe the dress, a vintage frock still in my closet waiting to be mended. I had every intention of filling in the face and detailing the skin, but the more she sat there, the more I considered her complete just the way she is, like a peaceful patient benevolent ghost of a girl — so much so that I invested in a custom frame. To this day she is one of my favorites; I like the way the wood grain appears through the paint.”

Witness “Miranda” and “Waiting” at Jones Gallery through September 28, 2023.

Studios Inc is pleased to present Lilly McElroy’s solo exhibition titled, “I Will Destroy You.” on view September 8th through October 21st, 2023.

The artistic projects Lilly McElroy pursues are a reflection of her complex relationship with the American West. They explore what it means to be an American in a time of diminished expectations. Working as a lens-based artist, she utilizes the landscape symbolically to address issues of power, gender, and eco-anxiety. 

Exhibition hours: Wednesday through Friday from 10 – 4pm and Saturday from 12 – 4pm and by appointment 

Location: 1708 Campbell Street, Kansas City, MO, 64108

Featured image: 

The artist in front of her work “The Monolith”.

An opening reception will be hosted on Friday, September 8th from 5 – 8 pm.

Lilly McElroy will host an artist talk on Saturday, September 9th from 12 – 1 pm.

I Will Destroy You will be on view thru October 21st. 

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“You are standing in a landscape. Maybe it is a pasture, or maybe it is the lakeshore on a summer evening, or maybe it is the top of a mountain, the wilderness past the end of the trail, but whatever this place is, in this moment, it feels safe. It feels stable. Then it doesn’t. All at once, there is dread and melancholy. You are here, waiting for an inevitable end. It is coming, you are grieving, but at least this place is pretty.

I will destroy you.

It’s natural to make photographs while you wait for the inevitable. Photography captures light and freezes time. It is an attempt to preserve the fleeting. For this exhibition photographs of the setting sun were made by McElroy using a 4 x 5 film camera. She then irrevocably altered the negatives, using her fingernail to scratch away the image of the sun. This action is small yet devastating; the anxious picking at a scab that leaves you with a lifelong scar. The sun, the very thing whose light makes the photograph possible, has been gouged out of the negative, the printed picture rendering this absence not as erasure revealing blank paper, but as the ominous birth of an angry black void. McElroy’s hand is directly linked to this destruction as the sun becomes a meteor, dark and crackling in the sky, a malevolent yellow nimbus dancing around it as it hurtles toward the surface of the earth, toward you.

In her monolithic works the sun is a dark orb that hovers over a bucolic field. It no longer emits energy or light; it only absorbs and you are standing in front of it. The innate silence of the photograph now presses down on the landscape. The rustling of the grass in the wind, the susurration of the insects in the field are cut off, and you can only hear the sounds of your own breath. McElroy made these images in the darkroom, laying negatives directly on top of light sensitive paper. With the press of a button, light flashed through the negative and struck the paper, chemically altering its structure. This transformation signals a shift, an irrevocable change, a violence that has been enacted and can’t be taken back.”

I Will Destroy You. will be on view thru October 21st.