THE AMBIVALENT NATURE OF THINGS AROUND US: NEW WORK BY JUSTIN FARKAS & MILES NEIDINGER
La Esquina | 1000 West 25th Street | 816.221.5115 First Friday opening reception: JULY 4, 6-9 pm Additional evening hours: Friday, July 11, 6-9pm; Friday, August 1, 6-9pm
La Esquina is pleased to present an ambitious exhibition of new work by Kansas City based artists Justin Farkas and Miles Neidinger. The exhibition features several large-scale installation-based pieces by each artist, completed on site, in addition to a small selection of mixed-media flat works.
Both artists work with unconventional materials, which they manipulate and combine to create objects and installations of surprising, often stunning beauty. Neidinger’s material palette here includes car bumpers, neon yarn, drinking straws, twist ties, and florescent duct tape, while Farkas employs plastic, tape, vinyl tarp, construction fencing, wooden 2x4s, window panes, venetian blinds, lightbulbs, bungee cords, and metal wiring. In both cases, the artists are interested first in recognizing (and affirming) the inherent functional and aesthetic properties of these materials and then in enacting a shift of context in order that they might be considered anew and re-purposed toward different ends.
A recent graduate in Painting from Kansas City Art Institute, Justin Farkas sees these materials as means to construct artwork in a way that “maintains ambiguity yet teeter totters on purposefulness.” Employing “hunter/gatherer and tool-making instincts every person is born with,” Farkas identifies and approaches his materials in a partially utilitarian manner: “clamps for securing wood, lights for seeing, and constructed wooden frames as a table for working.” This general construction then “serves as an outlet to keep building upon…The drive of the work itself is my own physical limitations; by creating scaffoldings, and wooden planks, the scale of the work can get progressively bigger, and in the end monumental in scale.” In a sense, the work begins to build itself.
Throughout this constructive process, Farkas is attentive to aesthetic and conceptual as well as cultural and spiritual concerns. Merging Dada and Abstract Expressionist influences, and citing contemporary artists including Richard Tuttle, Jessica Stockholder, Angela De la Cruz, Matthew Ritchie, and Neo Rauch as important inspirations, his works are the product of spontaneity and intuition as well as careful deliberation and calculated juxtaposition, and exemplify a painter’s eye for color, gesture, texture, and composition. “The fascination of creating new ideas has become a stadium of cataloging and appropriating different styles, movements and ideas of past works,” writes Farkas. Contextualizing his work within boarder artmaking trends, he notes: “For many artists appropriation evolves into a transformation process that turns from utilizing another idea, to making it into their own… tr(ying) to encounter something unique from merging elements together… Eclectic choices become our palette.”
A Kansas City Art Institute graduate in Sculpture (2000) and former Charlotte Street Award recipient (2005), Miles Neidinger presents several major new works that continue his investigation and inventive reconxtualization of “mundane” household materials as he seeks to disrupt culturally imposed hierarchies and categorizations/compartmentalizations. “Hot dogs were never to be found anywhere other than the meat drawer in my mother’s refrigerator. Nor was the “crisper” compartment ever contaminated with foods having “non-produce” qualities,” Neidinger writes. “This early implementation of ‘organization’ in my life physically and mentally, has greatly affected the way I perceive life as a father and a husband in a typical suburban setting, along with constituting a great deal to the way I approach art making.”
Works with titles such as We are inhabiting places of lavish color and texture and This person among us realizes a malleable association between disjuncture and hyphenation encourage viewers to shift perspective in order to “witness the world around us that is filled with beautiful junk.” Whether a sprawling, swirling installation composed solely of colorful scavenged automobile bumpers, or a labyrinthine aerial network of metallic twist ties, drinking straws and yarn, Neidinger hones in on the unique qualities of these everyday items to posit a reconsideration of “order” and to coax a new sense of attentiveness, possibility and wonder.
Urban Culture Project presents RITUAL OF THE BODY ELECTRIC A Multimedia Music and Dance Work Friday, September 5, 8 & 9:30pm at la Esquina, 1000 West 25th, KCMO 64108, 816.221.5115
Composer William J. Lackey, choreographer Jennifer Owen and visual artist Nate Fors present the world premiere of Ritual of the Body Electric, a multimedia music and dance work on September 5, 2008. 18 musicians and 5 dancers will perform the 30-minute work that is loosely based on a section of Walt Whitman's “I Sing the Body Electric.”
Two performances will take place on September 5, 2008 at La Esquina, 1000 W. 25th St., at 8:00pm and 9:30 pm. In addition, the artists will lead an informal discussion between performances, from 8:45 - 9:15, about the collaborative process behind the work.
The production features five dancers: Chloe Abel, Jesse Cooper, Matthew Powell, Rebka Sakati, and Jennifer Tierney; and 18 musicians: Dr. Rebecca Sherburn, soprano; Jonathan Borja, flute; Mary Ann Lucas, oboe ; Cheryl Melfi, clarinet; James Keel Williams, bassoon ; Liz Dunning, horn; Chris Larios, trumpet; John J. Jenkins, trombone; Marja M. Kerney, percussion; Mark E. Lowry, percussion; Christopher Levin, piano; Kara Land, harp; Marvin Gruenbaum, violin; Christian A. Fatu, violin; Tim Eshing, viola; Mark Stauffer, cello; Kristin Shafel, bass. The conductor is Christopher Kelts. Mica Thomas is the lighting designer and Christopher Biggs is the technical coordinator.
Tickets are $10 at the door. Fifty percent of all proceeds will be donated to Children's Mercy Hospitals and Clinics Cancer Program. This work is dedicated to the memory of Kathryn Ann McCallum Lackey.
About the collaborators: William J. Lackey, composer: The music of William J. Lackey has been featured at the Festival of New American Music, the Society of Composers, Inc. National Student Conference, Music for the XXI Century Festival, Quixotic Performance Fusion and California’s Festival of the Arts. The New York Art Ensemble, the California E.A.R. Unit, newEar, Linda Hirst- mezzo-soprano, Alan Hacker-clarinetist and Keith Michael Bohm-saxophonist have performed his music.
In summer of 2008 Lackey was selected as a resident artist for Troika Ranch’s Live–I Workshop where he studied with Dawn Stoppiello and Mark Coniglio at the 3LD Art and Technology Center New York, NY. Lackey was the winner of the 1998 New York Art Ensemble Young Composers Competition. He has received scholarships and fellowships to attend the Bowdoin International Summer Music Festival, Chamber Music Conference and Composers' Forum of the East (Bennington, VT) and Dartington International Summer School 2002-Advanced Composition Seminar (Devon, England). Lackey is a Doctor of Musical Arts candidate in music composition at the University of Missouri-Kansas City's Conservatory of Music and Dance where he also received a Master of Music in composition.
Jennifer Owen, choreographer: Jennifer Owen's ballet career has taken her around the globe. After training with Pacific Northwest Ballet School, San Francisco Ballet School, School of American Ballet, and the Bolshoi Ballet Academy, she went on to dance with the Russian State Ballet, Moscow Renaissance Ballet, Kansas City Ballet, Hong Kong Ballet, BalletMet, and had the unique experience of appearing as a guest artist with the National Ballet of Turkmenistan. Notable roles Jennifer has danced include the title role in “Giselle,” Kitri in “Don Quixote,” principal roles in George Balanchine's “Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux” and “Donizetti Variations”, and the central pas de deux in Todd Bolender's “Arena.” Jennifer is currently artistic director, dancer, and choreographer for the Owen/Cox Dance Group, an ensemble she founded with composer Brad Cox in 2006. She has choreographed numerous works for the Owen/Cox Dance Group, as well as nine works for Kansas City Ballet's “In the Wings” choreographic workshop, a piece for Quixotic Performance Fusion, and a winning entry for the 2006 Columbus Choreography Project. Jennifer is the recipient of a 2000 Princess Grace Honorarium.
Nate Fors, visual artist: While primarily a painter, Nate Fors has entertained a great variety of media from drawing and painting to public sculpture, installation, digital prints and video. Reinvention and materials are critical to his methods. Most recently, in May 2008, he collaborated with the Owen/Cox Dance Group on costume and set design for the Bottom of the Big Top, a ballet inspired by early 20th century circus music.
Fors is a past recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Charlotte Street Fund Award, an Avenue of the Arts Foundation Award and a Missouri Visual Artists Biennial Fellowship. He has shown extensively in the Kansas City area as well as in Los Angeles and New York. His solo exhibition venues include the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, and his paintings are in the collections of the Nelson-Atkins, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, the Kemper Museum of Art and the Spencer Museum at the University of Kansas as well as numerous corporate and private collections. Art in America, in their Annual 2001-2002 Guide, cited his Avenue of the Arts installation, toss, as one of the 23 best public art installations in the United States during the year 2000. In May 2004 Fors completed and installed lllooppi, a permanent outdoor sculpture commissioned by the city of Leawood, Kansas.
Contacts: William J. Lackey, composer* 757-870-0479 william@williamjlackey.com *please contact for interviews
