Materialist II

Group Exhibition Featuring:

Jessie Fisher

Melanie Johnson

Kathy Liao

Christopher Lowrance

Michael McCaffrey

Scott Seebart

“In a world myriad as ours, the gaze is a singular act: to look at something is to fill your whole life with it, if only briefly.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

MATERIALIST II features new paintings, drawings, and sculptures by six artists; Jessie Fisher, Melanie Johnson, Kathy Liao, Christopher Lowrance, Michael McCaffrey, and Scott Seebart are all local artists and educators devoted to perceptual painting, material exploration, and the physicality of their media. Collectively, the members of this group explore the phenomenological and the material while simultaneously employing the practice of making as a responsive vehicle for invention and a forum for reflection.

The work in this exhibition highlights each artist’s respective devotion to sustaining a poetic mediation between the directly observed, the recounted, and the re-presented, often via painstakingly meticulous, labor-intensive, or counterintuitive approaches. Close inspection of the work reveals individual methodologies that are far from direct, indicative of conscious parameters concretized while engaging with the meditative process of making.

Choices of subject are deliberate; the psychological, the familial, the ecological and the overlooked come together as icons signifying each artist’s insight whose full impact is revealed to viewers willing to spend time unpacking process as a function of meaning. The making of the subject is the subject’s personification. This devotion is emblematic of a specific kind of intimacy, demonstrated through the artists’ engagement with material and subject simultaneously, hinting at a proxy for intellectual and emotional connections rather than material as a mere means of representation.

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LVAC COVID-19 Safety Procedures:

We are making sure to follow all the safety measures during this pandemic that have been issued by Kansas City, Missouri such as: social distancing, proper and hygiene and frequently disinfecting high traffic areas and surfaces.

We will be wearing masks at all times and we ask that you do as well. We have disposable face masks available along with hand sanitizer to use upon entry/exit.

Please do not come to the gallery if you are exhibiting symptoms, such as fever or chills, cough, shortness of breath or difficulty breathing, muscle or body aches, a new loss of taste or smell, sore throat, nausea, vomiting or diarrhea.

Dress Code: Black Only celebrates resilience reserved for the Black student body at Kansas City Art Institute. The work in this exhibition showcases intersections of the Black consciousness, interior, and internet spaces. As critical political conversations have moved from the streets to online platforms, there has been a rise of the fetishization of Black suffering supporting agendas detrimental to the Black community.

The Black Student Union requires participants to steer away from violent themes to rectify the misrepresentation of the Black body in the media. Grasping this extraordinary time of isolation and rest as a guide to self-reflection, we claim a new reality that embraces discovery and representation through the inherent need for creativity. Each artist in this exhibition demonstrates a response to history through various mediums to revel in the present and prosper to remarkable, unimaginable Black futures.

KCAI BSU 2020 Exhibition and Featured Artists

“I believe that art, like the moments captured in these images, is alchemy. Lightning in a bottle. In this collection, my goal was to take singular, idiosyncratic elements and create a unified whole through the transportive power of nostalgia. I hope you enjoy the journey.”

 — Jeff Robinson, 2021

SLCA is pleased to present our inaugural exhibition of paintings by Jeff Robinson, Nostalgias. In this series, of black and white and gray large-scale paintings and intimate works on paper, Robinson breathes new life into snapshots¬¬¬ of the recent past. A couple celebrating New Year’s Eve, society women dressed in furs, and swing dancers are all caught in brief impressions. These paintings give transitory glimpses of life back then, of an age that already feels bygone. Viewers are transformed as visitors, tourists, invited to engage with fleeting moments that we recognize and, perhaps, even long for.

Equally important is how the painter convinces us of the truth of this experience. The subject matter seems familiar, as amateur photography from an extremely interesting family album, but upon close inspection each painted image is made of entirely abstract shapes of shades of light and dark. What seems to be a woman’s face from afar is revealed to be abstraction upon closer view. Realism dissolves into shape and value and the artist, as the blue-collar worker of culture and the translator of the painted experience, takes a well-deserved bow.

Jeff Robinson lives and works in Kansas City, Missouri. His work is in the corporate collections of The New York Times, Nike Corporation, Time Warner, American General Insurance, St. Regis Hotels, American Century Investments, and the Albrecht Kemper Museum.

“As a multidisciplinary artist who often collaborates with scientists, travels on expeditions at sea to create works that shed light on the natural world, works with data, and tries to connect the viewer with places and processes hidden from view, this body of work is an inward pivot – each painting, a personal meditation. I hope to capture these distortions of time, flurry of emotions, fluctuations as I drag the paintbrush to the beat of my own breath. Time is passing, a time less linear and more dimensional.” –Rebecca Rutstein

Philadelphia based artist, Rebecca Rutstein, explores abstraction inspired by her interest in geology, microbiology, marine science and the undercurrents that continually shape the physical world. Her paintings incorporate structural networks that articulate patterns found in nature, data, maps, micro and macro, handmade and mechanized, linear and solid. These visual experiences shed light on places and processes normally hidden from view and engage the viewer with a heightened connection to these enigmatic worlds. Through ongoing collaborations with scientists, much of her recent work has focused on mapping data of the deep sea seeking to illuminate a hidden world.

In her new series of work, Topographies of Time, Rutstein’s language of abstraction and exploration of hidden networks pivots inward, as she reflects on the impact of recent events on our experience of global interconnectedness. She suggests that our shared experience of time has shifted, stretched, bent and slowed, or alternately become frantic in fits and starts, as normalcy has been superseded by world events. Many of Rutstein’s paintings incorporate cellular networks of forms, lines or bands of colors that reveal an experience of time that is changing, elongating and warping as routines shift and days blur their boundaries. The series is a record of altering emotional states during the global pandemic: feelings of containment, anxiety, gratitude and new possibilities.

With over 25 solo exhibitions, Rebecca Rutstein has exhibited widely in museums, institutions and galleries throughout the United States and is the recipient of numerous awards. Her work is in the public collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Museum, Temple University, Johns Hopkins Hospital & Albert Einstein College of Medicine, among others. Public commissions include Convergence, AT&T/Mural Arts Program, Philadelphia, PA, 2019 and Sculptural Commission, Yale University, Yale Science Building, New Haven, CT, 2019 and numerous others.

Rebecca Rutstein holds a BFA from Cornell University (with study abroad in Rome) and an MFA from University of Pennsylvania. She has been a visiting artist at museums and universities across the US and enjoys speaking about the intersection of art and science.