Jones Gallery May Group Art Show!
First Friday opening, May 5th..
Artist reception is from 5 till 9pm. All welcome and always free.
Also with 150 pieces on display, both local and national Artists
Show runs thru May 25th.
Also open daily from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. Closed Sunday
Jones Gallery 1717 Walnut, KCMO. 64108
816 – 421-2111
https://jonesgallerykc.com/ 

Artist Statement:

My art morphs different mediums into visual meditations and dream-like imageries. Creating is therapeutic, a form of alternative medicine for me. As an artist, I create forms of communication from the subconscious and conscious state of mind. I am constantly learning and listening to my personal visions. I have a strong need to create something that is healing for myself and possibly a connection for others. Drawing intricate line patterns compared to sand painting or the cracks in your hand is the way for me to have the introspection of self-like meditation. Which in turn, creates a positive impulse of calmness, intensity, or a balanced flow. I create because it stimulates an internal mind-bending effect of my center that takes me somewhere else. This kata (form) of expression is an escape from my current reality to release an honest and raw output of my existence through creativity: To visually twist a space with or without technology to amplify a human experience. With spontaneous and or controlled movements with patience and thought, I like to integrate the environment with unique visuals and collaborations with video and sound waves. This expanding language is interpreted with personal contemplation. 

-Adrian Halpern 

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Rich “JKR70” Lester is a music producer, audio engineer, and visual artist from Kansas City, Mo. He has over 25 years of experience in his art form. 

Artist Statement:

I am formerly of the Hip Hop group Human CropCircles. I have worked with Ces Cru, Sage Francis, Young Rob, Romy of Macromantics, Red Dot Didactics, Rough Draft, Approach of Dat Gang/Datura Records, Milkdrop of Dat Gang/Datura Records, Lucid Flows, Lou Rip, Donald “Scribe” Ross, Anti Crew, Sike Style of Sike Style Industries, Flavor Pak, and Liz Suwandi to name a few.

I have happily worked with Adrian Halpern off and on for approximately 15 years on various art/ audio collaborations, most of which can be enjoyed at www.adrianhalpern.com. This current collaboration was a bit of a departure from our usual dynamic. This time I was asked to compose audio based on the overall vibe of seeing Adrian’s process. I took inspiration from conversations, text correspondence, and viewing his art at various stages during his process over a 45-day period.

The audio you’ll hear at this showing is the result of that inspiration. It was quite fun as well as a bit challenging at times, I do hope you enjoy it.

-Rich “JKR70” Lester

I look to the skies and watch the birds, storms rolling in, changing weather, and brilliant sunsets. We have lived on the Kansas prairie for four years and I am moved and changed by it, my work is much influenced. The subtle starkness is magnificent as I watch undulating streams of snow geese move like ribbons, calling far overhead. The Spring Peepers are singing, a first hint of Spring. Geese and ducks are returning as are many migrating birds. Ranchers are burning prairies, and see the horizon glow hot pink as the sun sets. The ground goes from charred black to neon green in a week, amazing. Often the talk is about water, whether is there enough or rarely is there too much. 

What damage are we doing to the earth, our waters, our living beings, and ourselves? What legacy do we leave for those who come after? First peoples teach that what we do now affects the next seven generations. What does uranium mining do to the Diné people who drink the same water? The repercussions seem endless, Native people are losing their ancestral lands in coastal areas due to global warming. Chief Oren Lyons, Faithkeeper of the Turtle Clan, Onondaga Nation speaks of ice, and I quote: “The ice is melting, the winds are coming, the fires are burning, the climate is changing. It is coming and it is coming very fast”. At some point the constant striving for greater production, more fracking, and more chemicals on our farms, and in our factory farming has to stop, it has to change. What legacy will we leave for our children and their children? Hopi and other prophecies have predicted that we would come to a fork in the road. I believe that we are there now, do we turn toward healing and change, or continue down this slippery path? I have faith that there are new ways to do things. And yet I mourn vanishing species; what will we do without bees and other pollinators?

The title of my exhibition refers to a beautiful song from the indigenous Tewa people called “Mother Earth, Father Sky”. I am respectfully borrowing the title, it is not my work, I have been deeply moved and inspired by it for nearly all of my life, and it echoes my feelings. These works are my prayers for goodness and healing.

I work with plaster and other mediums in my newest body of work, they are mounted on deep birch boards. I have carved into it, shaped it, made impressions, and added paint, and mixed media. I am over the moon inspired by the landscape in southern Missouri and northern Arkansas. 

I have family roots in this region, among the Ouachita and Ozark mountains. Have you hiked in them, see the crags and hollers, floated the rivers? I am drawn to water; thawing waterfalls, moving over rocks with sunlight reflecting from it, and the sounds, oh the sounds. 

And in honoring Father Sky, I am sharing cyanotypes with imagery of migrating birds and butterflies. Recent batiks reflect flowers, the Milky Way, and the stars. I look up and I look down. I am quiet and feel so fortunate to have had these transcendent experiences. Enjoy, and find quiet and peace while contemplating my work.

1. https://centerforneweconomics.org/publications/the-ice-is-melting/

Bio

Valerie Doran Bashaw, of rural Kansas, is a professional fiber/mixed media artist and fine arts educator. Always learning and experimenting, her media choices include plaster on board, cyanotypes, intricately dyed and stitched fabric stretched over deep frames, batik, shibori, surface design, combined and refined. 

Imagery is subtle, though colors can be intense. She is happiest watching birds, landscape, storms move in, with a strong interest in weather patterns, geology and geography. Attracted to the dance between accidental and intentional, spontaneity versus control, yin and yang. Creation is fueled by intuition and the drive to make art. 

Valerie is an educator, working with students of all ages and abilities. Education includes a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and a MFA from the University of Michigan. She has taught for Metropolitan Community Colleges, Park University, University of Central Missouri, Ghost Ranch Conference and Education Center, Kansas City Young Audiences, Accessible Arts, Bishop Spencer Place, the Barstow School and other venues. She continues to show her work exhibitions in the greater Kansas City area and her work is in many collections; including University of Kansas Medical Center, physicians offices, businesses and private homes from Mexico to Michigan and beyond. 

She has been active in various arts organizations including the Best of Missouri Hands, Missouri Fiber Artists and is on the Board of Directors for Sharing a Vision for Generations, raising money to award scholarships for Lakota women to study Lakota Studies at Oglala Lakota College in South Dakota. She recently co-authored a grant to benefit her rural community. Fingers crossed that funding will be awarded! 

Her works embrace the aesthetic of quiet, meditative work, meant to encourage reflection. A way to retreat from the hectic, over-stimulated world. Find the dreamtime, take a deep breath, retreat into contemplation and silence. 

Artist Statement:

My art morphs different mediums into visual meditations and dream-like imageries. Creating is therapeutic, a form of alternative medicine for me. As an artist, I create forms of communication from the subconscious and conscious state of mind. I am constantly learning and listening to my personal visions. I have a strong need to create something that is healing for myself and possibly a connection for others. Drawing intricate line patterns compared to sand painting or the cracks in your hand is the way for me to have the introspection of self-like meditation. Which in turn, creates a positive impulse of calmness, intensity, or a balanced flow. I create because it stimulates an internal mind-bending effect of my center that takes me somewhere else. This kata (form) of expression is an escape from my current reality to release an honest and raw output of my existence through creativity: To visually twist a space with or without technology to amplify a human experience. With spontaneous and or controlled movements with patience and thought, I like to integrate the environment with unique visuals and collaborations with video and sound waves. This expanding language is interpreted with personal contemplation.

-Adrian Halpern

— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —

Rich “JKR70” Lester is a music producer, audio engineer, and visual artist from Kansas City, Mo. He has over 25 years of experience in his art form.

Artist Statement:

I am formerly of the Hip Hop group Human CropCircles. I have worked with Ces Cru, Sage Francis, Young Rob, Romy of Macromantics, Red Dot Didactics, Rough Draft, Approach of Dat Gang/Datura Records, Milkdrop of Dat Gang/Datura Records, Lucid Flows, Lou Rip, Donald “Scribe” Ross, Anti Crew, Sike Style of Sike Style Industries, Flavor Pak, and Liz Suwandi to name a few.

I have happily worked with Adrian Halpern off and on for approximately 15 years on various art/ audio collaborations, most of which can be enjoyed at www.adrianhalpern.com. This current collaboration was a bit of a departure from our usual dynamic. This time I was asked to compose audio based on the overall vibe of seeing Adrian’s process. I took inspiration from conversations, text correspondence, and viewing his art at various stages during his process over a 45-day period.

The audio you’ll hear at this showing is the result of that inspiration. It was quite fun as well as a bit challenging at times, I do hope you enjoy it.

-Rich “JKR70” Lester

Why is when, and now is why, and we will ALWAYS want, AND all is “What the holy fuck!”

Never has this been an obstacle for lucid critical or crucial thought for whom the dumbbell tolls in the skies of material wantonness. Q: How did we even get here? The needs, creeds, and greed of all the wants are re-assembled in this body of work. Faux luxury facilitated by dead corporate machines like Sears, JC Penny, and Montgomery Wards with 1200-page catalogs is a good place to begin perhaps. Paper bricks printed on glossy non-archival paper layered to the sky for empire building. If aliens from outer space were to visit us right now (PLEASE help us now!), many of their questions could be answered in those catalogs.

Core samples have been gathered in these non-fine art things and born again from merely rummaging through the graveyards of consumable “goods” re-swapped for more $$ in the stores of thrift and performing fleas. By the process of cultural anthropology, many of these cheap consumer goods have been given a new life, again to adorn the walls and tables of mainstream America. The artist has found inspiration in the cheap stuff of yester-year, thusly re-arting the stuff that was mass-produced to give the façade of style and class. So hurry! We’re running out of stuff fast!

The white middle/upper/other classes examined have been recorded in both the good and bad books of history and consequently flushed out the birth canals of the unimaginative landfills (progress). Facsimiles with objective meanings defy our understanding in the rubbish now, yet provide proof-positive of who we were, who we are, and what we mostly still want to be. So uselessly useful in their time now become “utilitarian fine art” again for their utilitarian

purpose in the third place. Artistic alchemical license has freely given the artist a full-on-all-out-all-American stratagem with these junk store findings. America in its most peculiar vintage hour… American at its final artistic process…

So for now, we look to the past for where we went wrong, right, and/or left. Based on the hunting and gathering of antiquated pictorial evidence, allegorical signifiers, aggressive branding, and personal insider insights, observable clues are given in an absurdist, unflinching and often lowbrow way for your viewing entertainment. To laugh or to cry?… You decide…

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Who is Leon Richmond?

Leon Richmond was born in Defiance, Ohio. His father moved their large Catholic family from Lafayette, Indiana to Yakima, Washington to open a Burger Chef restaurant in 1967. The subsequent years in the 1970’s spent over a hamburger grille and deep fryer, serving an eager and hungry public Happy Meals, cheap collectibles, high-fructose corn syrup and grease would in-due help inform his artwork tremendously.

Richmond worked for 17 years at three different Alberstons grocery stores around Washington State. In hindsight, the time spent in the grocery store business would be as equally informative on his art as was his time working at his father’s Burger Chef. The grocery stores provided a museum of pop culture and capitalism to critique and absorb. Plugging along with his life, he began attending art walks in downtown Seattle around the late-1980’s. It was around this time when he developed a curiosity for contemporary art. At first, it was a distraction to his monotonous life. But it would eventually develop into a full-blown passion. In the years that followed, he would spend countless hours in art museums, galleries, watching documentaries and reading at the Seattle library.

After years of working soul-sucking jobs, married and divorced twice by now, he unenthusiastically took a job as an accountant in 1999. In 2006, Richmond came to Norman, Oklahoma to visit an old high school friend. Wanting a new start, he applied for and eventually accepted a Staff Accounting II position at The University of Oklahoma.

Continuing his passion for art anywhere he could find it, he didn’t start making any until fairly recently. It wasn’t until he befriended Prof. Bob Dohrmann at the University of Oklahoma School of Visual Arts in 2016, who ultimately encouraged Richmond to, “Start making stuff, why not?” Dohrmann suggested that Richmond turn his decades long hobby of thrift store, antique and LP record collecting into an art practice. After he completed approx. 30 pieces, Prof. Dohrmann insisted that Richmond exhibit his work and offered to assist him in finding venues. Richmond was very reluctant, but eventually agreed. Completely self-taught, the work presented in this exhibition is the product of Richmond’s obsessive work ethic since 2018. Introverted and humble by nature, he has no plans to stop “making stuff” anytime soon.

Who is Robert Dohrmann?

Robert Dohrmann received his MFA in Painting and Drawing in 1992 at Central Washington University, Ellensburg, Washington. In 1999 he took a position in the department in the Foundations area. Over the years he has taught a variety of Studio courses, but currently the bulk of his teaching duties have been in the Core area and an online comic book theory course.

In 2018, Dohrmann took the pseudonym: Leon Richmond. In combination with traditional 2D materials and collage techniques, the objects used to construct his body of work are mostly large romantic cardboard print paintings, shadow box clocks, unlistenable LP records and a variety of found objects. The process of cultural anthropology (picking though thrift stores) is conducted anywhere he happens to find junk stores. He likens these stores to museums (also consumer graveyards) where affordable consumer goods go to die and hopefully be reborn. When he finds something that piques his curiosity, he “re-arts” the object and gives it a new life through remix and mash-up strategies. The antiquated appearance in the found pieces are crucial, as each vintage object comes with a ready-made veneer of age. It signifies American consumer history and points directly to our current relationship to many concerning topics of today, such as middle/upper class consumerism, low-cost mass production, religious intolerance, unmonitored capitalistic greed, climate concerns, patriarchal power systems and White American hierarchies.