Alt-Archives: Three exhibits presented by Bri Murphy & Belle-Pilar Fleming

April 2 – 30, 2021

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Statement from the Artists:

We are so excited to share the work in these exhibits with the Bunker Center for the Arts and its viewership. The generosity of the space provided has enabled us to present each of our respective solo work, as well as debut a brand new collaborative series. Each of these three exhibits employ the use of archival and historical subject matter as both inspiration and raw material. While conceptually related in this way, each is individual in its specificity and form. Please read on about each exhibit, and thank you for your attention.

-Bri and Belle-Pilar

Q̶u̶i̶x̶o̶t̶i̶c̶, Bri Murphy & Belle-Pilar Fleming

Charity Benefit Event

What if Shirley Chisholm had won her historic bid for president in 1972? In this collaborative body of work we interrogate the notion of electability in both historical and contemporaneous contexts by recasting the victor of the 1972 presidential race. Chisholm was the first black woman elected to Congress, and the first to seek a major party nomination for the presidency. Her campaign (and general ambition) was dubbed “quixotic,” in other words, too idealistic to succeed. In reviewing the landscape of contemporary American politics it is clear that the tendency to classify marginalized candidates in this way still stands in the way of true progress.

Thus, our endeavor to communicate with an alternate past exemplifies both a space of defiance and one of dreaming. These efforts are inspired by a host of historical material, including iconic imagery of Nixon, anonymous vintage dinnerware, industrial commemorative ceramics, handmade signature quilts, and actual ephemera of Chisholm’s campaign. With this work we invite viewers to question their own assumptions about electability and the standards by which one is dubbed worthy of leadership.

100% of profits from Quixotic will be split between Black Voters Matter and the Higher Heights Leadership Fund.

Unfounded, Bri Murphy

The work in this series challenges the glorification of the Founding Fathers as they are canonized in both historical contexts and contemporary applications. Washington, Jefferson, Madison…their biographies are dotted with mentions of their wives and loyal servants; their accomplishments archived in stone, oil, and ink. Within this cultural milieu, it is easy to forget that continued reverence for historical figures such as the Founding Fathers requires a forgetting of violence and/or a complete omission of other histories. The product of a collective forgetting is a new mythology, an American mythology that proliferates stories of white fathers and sons, and the visual iconography of our country is made in their image.

The busts in this room, Unfounded: Washington and Unfounded: Jefferson, are 3D printed versions of the famous sculptures by Jean-Antoine Houdon, appropriated from digital scans found online. The democratization of information on the internet is a conduit to the past, a path to collaborations across time and space. These new iterations embody their own instability – their low-resolution echoes the degeneration of the single, hegemonic American narrative that every day continues to unravel.

Candidly – the work in this exhibition is the result of a complicated relationship to my own American identity. I hope moments of reverence shine as brightly as the criticisms – for I am proud to live in a country where I am free to love and fight for what I believe in. My practice requires me to make space for the things that cause me despair, make me the most furious, and also challenge me to find hope and pride. Thank you for sharing it with me.

Something in the Hands, Belle-Pilar Fleming 

This project examines lineage and identity formation within the spaces of queer archives, particularly as it pertains to the lives of queer women. Archives manifest in a myriad of different forms, from the personal collection to the institutional body, often holding a record of both struggle and triumph. At a time when our country is reckoning with a legacy of injustice, historic collections can shed light on the traumas of the past, reveal the persistence of human agency, and offer suggestions for a more equitable future.

Much of this work draws on source materials found in the Ohio Lesbian Archive in Cincinnati, OH, as well as the Lesbian Herstory Archive in Brooklyn, NY, and additionally includes items of my own collecting (such as photographs, and personal testimonies). These materials straddle a line between the personal and the institutional, at once anonymous and yet deeply interpersonal. The physical space of the archive itself, as well as the subjects which its materials address, are equal points of interest in my work. Viewers are invited to consider the archive as an affective space as well as one where negotiations of visibility, personal experience, and political realities are interwoven.

Are you ready for a refreshing LIVE dance experience? We are! This May, Kansas City Ballet welcomes you to Starlight Theatre for a 70-minute performance uniquely designed to tantalize your sense of adventure. All ballets on the program are brand new works by extraordinarily gifted choreographers, including KC Ballet’s Artistic Director Devon Carney, KC Ballet Masters Kristi Capps and Parrish Maynard, Principal Dancer at Houston Ballet Melody Mennite, KCB II Manager Christopher Ruud, and KC Ballet Company dancers Emily Mistretta and James Kirby Rogers. These outdoor performances will be an exciting opportunity to experience live ballet on stage once again.

Kansas City Ballet would like to extend a very special offer to our community in celebration of essential and front-line workers with a FREE performance Saturday, May 22 at 2 p.m. as our way of thanking them for all their vital work this past year. Reservations are required and can be made online at kcstarlight.com or by calling the Starlight Theatre Box Office at (816) 363‑7827. FREE parking for the matinee performance is available. Use promo code: KCCARES

Masks, social distancing, and safety protocols will be required at all performances.

These performances are sponsored in part by BOK Financial, Missouri Arts Council, Muriel McBrien Kauffman Foundation, National Endowment of the Arts, Richard J. Stern Foundation for the Arts.

Are you ready for a refreshing LIVE dance experience? We are! This May, Kansas City Ballet welcomes you to Starlight Theatre for a 70-minute performance uniquely designed to tantalize your sense of adventure. All ballets on the program are brand new works by extraordinarily gifted choreographers, including KC Ballet’s Artistic Director Devon Carney, KC Ballet Masters Kristi Capps and Parrish Maynard, Principal Dancer at Houston Ballet Melody Mennite, KCB II Manager Christopher Ruud, and KC Ballet Company dancers Emily Mistretta and James Kirby Rogers. These outdoor performances will be an exciting opportunity to experience live ballet on stage once again.

Masks, social distancing, and safety protocols will be required at all performances.

Tickets available at https://www.kcstarlight.com/events/event-detail-production/kansas-city-ballet-at-starlight/

Explosive energy dominates the work of Sarah Krepp and Olivia Petrides. Krepp locates a powerful gesture in found materials, in blown-out shredded tires which are gathered from highway debris. Blow-outs force the wires, embedded in the rubber, into writhing gesticulations of accumulated stress. Petrides utilizes simple tools and the basic element of drawing – the line — to enact roiling abstractions of overwhelming natural forces into baroque masses. Both artists see aggressive marking as an emblematic carrier of immense forces within urban and natural environments. Petrides and Krepp achieve a linear complexity, referencing turbulent atmospheres and tangled social workings, thus posing questions about the relationship between human actions and nature’s limitations.

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My drawings are immersive large-scale abstractions based on travels to magnificent natural phenomena such as volcanoes, icebergs, glaciers, caves, and the aurora borealis. I am interested in how nostalgic evocations of the transcendent resonate with contemporary social pressures on the environment: What is awe and wonder when saturated with guilt and regret? Me images utilize dramatic Romantic suggestions of the infinite and the sublime, which then collapse into shifting tensions that mirror our current uncertain engagement with nature. — Olivia Petrides

With these visually complex, sometimes compacted, sometimes expansive works, I strive for a different kind of communication where a poetic dynamic is felt before the content is understood. It becomes twofold. In some works, the bending and almost lyrical tire forms I couple with needlepoint stitches in the shadows and interstices. With this I look to set up an interplay between the brute/power of the road and the delicate/vulnerability of domestic handicraft. Retread blown-out tires are representative of the all-American landscape. I seek to question our indulgent contemporary society as well as present an aesthetically dynamic experience. — Sarah Krepp

Spectrum is a collection of artworks produced nearly entirely in Kansas City, Missouri over the last decade. This exhibition is intended as an immersion, a memoir, and a thank you to this place.

I have habitually brought the past into a contemporary context as an opportunity to reflect, to heal, and more often than not, as an American, to beg forgiveness. This thrilling moment we inhabit in history provides an opportunity for reconciliation with our collective story in order to imagine a future that functions more fully for every one of us. The newest work explores these same interactions in a more personal way. The pandemic forced a quiet space for deep reflection, forgiveness, and gratitude, as well as illuminating the path to an ongoing conversation around personal responsibility. — Christel Highland