Doors of Deception is an exhibition of the transportive potentials of abstraction in the work of Harper Newell and Max Crutcher.

The opening reception is on First Friday, March 6, (6 – 9 PM) at Vulpes Bastille.

This exhibition presents the distinct methods that each artist uses to create hypnotic and illusive visual spaces. Through weaving and drawing, the artists employ formal elements to create an optical push and pull between surface and image, inviting the viewer into their work.

Newell’s weavings form highly saturated, gradient color fields, which offer the viewer an escape from the hyper stimulation of modern everyday life. Inspired by the idea of portals, her works provide glimpses of another world, a serene plane of existence made of only color and space.

Crutcher’s oil pastel drawings use overlapping organic forms to create shifting spaces that entrance the viewer. Shapes collide and align to suggest new forms, while negative spaces emerge and recede to create a precarious visual space for the viewer.

These interactions create a persistent disorientation as the artist playfully conspires to subvert the viewer’s perception. There is a sublime rhythm in the sweeping gradients of color and shape-shifting spaces the artists create, and they act together to form vibrant worlds of beauty and illusion.

Doors of Deception asks you to explore the pathways these artists have forged, to escape your surroundings, if only momentarily, and to move through the gallery filled with texture, shape and color.

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Vulpes Bastille is an artist-run space in Kansas City’s East Crossroads that houses twelve studios and hosts monthly exhibitions selected through an open call. Located in a 100-year-old renovated dancehall, Vulpes Bastille offers an expansive platform for the community to create and display work, with an emphasis on experimental projects, emerging voices, and students. Vulpes Bastille has remained a fortress for Kansas City’s creative community since 2012.

of sight, of mind is a site-specific installation featuring architectural constructions by Alejandro Acierto and three collaborators.

This project organizes new and ongoing works shaped by artists invested in making visible the unseen operations, architectures, and mechanics of US-based carceral systems.

Highlighting the impact prisons have on people, communities, and cities, particularly with the increase of policing and militarization, state surveillance, and data extraction, the works of this exhibition contend with contemporary expressions of capture that challenge the function of the broader criminal justice system.

While remaining cautious around the politics and effects of visibility – conditions integral to increased rates of criminalization historically – this installation instead insists on a refusal to ignore the specifics of state violence, to keep these occurrences in the present at the top of our consciousness. As exhausting as it is, we cannot afford to look away.

Welcome to our March Art Gallery Show!
The First Friday hours on March 6th. are from 10am till 8pm.
Regular Gallery hours are from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.
Monday thru Saturday, closed Sunday.
Show runs thru April 2nd..
All are welcome and always free to visit, thanks!
Jones Gallery 1717 Walnut, KCMO. 64108
816 – 421‑2111
https://jonesgallerykc.com/ 

Artist Statements

Mike Miller:

Everything is a machine, and there are two main types, human-made and nature-made machines. For instance trees are natural machines that absorb carbon dioxide and create oxygen, and human made machines such as the printing press, birth control pill, smartphones, etc. These machines both natural and human-made have initiated nearly all changes in human culture. These machines have also driven nearly all the changes in Earth’s environment both good and bad.

With these sculptures I hope to illustrate that we as individuals are personally responsible for Earth’s environment. I also believe that as human technology advances the difference between natural and human-made machines will decrease until they eventually blend together, and that the merging of the two is a good thing that can eventually fix the Earth’s environmental problems. Then when the real Aliens come to Earth they will judge us by the quality of our art. So sort of as an insurance policy in case the real Aliens judge us harshly. Wise people should have a little ceramic Alien Deity to keep on a shelf in their house. It can’t hurt, and might keep you & your family from getting beamed up, or conversely, if it sounds fun, put you first in line to get beamed up:~)

Meghan Miller:

I aim to make beautiful spaces for people to meet, to gather together or visit alone, to feel easy, to have fun or sit quietly. Third places are essential to healthy societies, and often overlooked in a culture of individualism. Installation art can fulfill both the soul’s need for beauty and the need for connection and comfort.

Text for Ceramic Alien Kiosk:

When the real Aliens come to Earth they will judge us by the quality of our art.

So sort of as an insurance policy in case the real Aliens judge us harshly everyone should have one of these little ceramic Alien deities on a shelf in their house.

Artist Bio:

Mike Miller is best known for his Machine-Nature Interface series of sculptures. These machine-nature forms combine a natural object with a man made object, creating a machine that produces an original movement or action. Most of Mike’s works are kinetic, whether powered by a motor and salvaged gears, hand crank, the wind, or kids on a swing set. The movements produced echo the machinations of nature itself- plants’ production of oxygen, the orbit of a moon around a planet. As man made machines and nature made machines advance the difference between the two becomes indistinguishable. Mike was born, raised, and educated in Kansas and finds inspiration and materials for both the machine and the nature aspects of his work around his home and studio in rural Butler County.

Meghan Miller is an mutli-diciplinery installation artist based in Wichita, Kansas and living in rural Butler County, Kansas. She earned an MFA in Sculpture from Wichita State University in 2022 and a BFA in painting from Wichita State in 2009. In the ten years in between Miller worked as a substitute teacher, museum event staff, vintage clothing seller, and was one-half of installation and performance art duo Linnebur & Miller along with Hallie Linnebur. Miller has often created artwork that is humorous and experience-based, bridging the gaps between installation art, costuming, entertainment, spectacle, and party decor, which informs her current interest in creating spaces for people to “just be”- to interact with others, to be alone, to be somewhere magical, to, in the words of Louise Nevelson, “rest and have some fun.”

Mike and Meghan have been married for 13 years and have had the good luck to create art together, including the “tieflatable” on display here..