Materialist
Leedy Voulkos Art Center, 2012 Baltimore Ave. Kansas City, MO 64108 (map)
Melanie Johnson
Kathy Liao
Christopher Lowrance
Michael McCaffrey
Scott Seebart
March 1 - April 27, 2019
Main Gallery
MATERIALIST
In their inaugural exhibition as a group, MATERIALIST features recent paintings and drawings from six artists and educators in the Kansas City area who are devoted to a poetic mediation between the directly observed, the recounted and the invented. Storytellers, soothsayers and silent observers, what they share, is that it is the physicalism of their material which determines the consciousness of their imagery.
If, as Bonnard declared, that a painting is a ‘surface whose laws are beyond objects’, it follows that painterly intervention acts as both form’s concealment and its revelation. Hands that vigorously carve out volume, discursively cling to surface and obliterate as much as they reveal, pair with eyes that witness and orchestrate the building of personal allegories and tactile histories.