Lens-based artist Lilly McElroy will host an artist talk on her solo exhibition titled, “I Will Destroy You.” on Saturday, September 9th from 12 – 1 pm.

Featured image: 

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

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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. 

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

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

Studios Inc is pleased to present an opening reception for Lilly McElroy’s solo exhibition titled, “I Will Destroy You.” on Friday, September 8th from 5 – 8 pm.

Featured image: 

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

_____________________________________________

“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. 

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

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

A native New Yorker, Terry Winters graduated from Pratt Institute in 1971, focusing on painting. Through the 1970s, while studying nature, especially molecular level life forms, Winters honed his craft as a drawer and a painter until he was ready for his inaugural exhibition in 1982 at the prestigious Sonnabend Gallery. Later that same year he began his first foray into printmaking at Universal Limited Art Editions (ULAE) on Long Island. Winters became one of the leading printmakers in the U.S. At first, he was leaving his Manhattan studio one day a week to work with the master printers at ULAE, and that later escalated to up to four days a week. As art historian Richard Axsom wrote in “The Philosophers’ Stone: The Prints of Terry Winters:”

Printmaking is a forum whose procedures and collaborative protocols have allowed Winters to explore the expressive nature of his drawings. For an artist whose cardinal subject is protean form, printmaking encourages a changing image through the various proofing phases that lead to an editioned print. A print reflects a progressive history of alterations. It is a record of mutation, an accumulation of discrete changes that has no exact counterpoint in drawing or painting.

Over the years, Winters’ paintings, drawings, and prints have been featured in major retrospectives at the Boston Museum of Fine Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Irish Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Serenity is defined as a state of being calm, peaceful, and untroubled. Many things achieve these feelings; beautiful landscapes, nature, calming colors, yoga, gardens, beaches, bodies of water, and whatever else makes you feel calm.

The “Serenity” art exhibition and benefit opens endless possibilities for artists to share their ideas of calmness through artwork! Subject matter may include anything that provides a sense of peace, calmness, or tranquility. This theme is open to your own interpretation and we can’t wait to see what artists will submit.

This exhibition is a benefit for Welcome House with 50% of sales going to the organization, and the remaining 50% to artists for their beautiful creations. Their mission is to provide a high-quality, moral, and open residential program to recovering alcoholics and drug-addicted men facing the difficult transition from treatment, incarceration, and homelessness, to reintegration to society as productive citizens.

Beco Gallery is pleased to present, Disconcerting Present… or was that a dream?, an off-site group exhibition hosted by Bunker Center For The Arts featuring Kristina Gabuardy, Adams Puryear, Sam Dybeck, Chelsea Smith, Lily Erb, Will Preman, and Sophie Stebbins, six artists living in the Kansas City region and one from the Chicago area. The exhibition features a wide variety of mediums, ranging from sculpture, painting, lit ceramics, and a site-specific installation by Lily Erb. The exhibition spans between two rooms, one with more reality and representational works, alluding to real life, heavy with a sense of anxiety and over- consumption. The other room departs from reality, with blue lights and works that seem out of a strange dream.