Third Friday opening reception: September 21, 6-10 pm
Slope Failure is a site specific installation of new work by Garry Noland featuring a combination of freestanding sculptures constructed of duct tape and National Geographic magazines; wall-leaning pieces composed of stacked television sets; and wall-hung drawings – all drawing inspiration from the notion of ‘slope failure.”
The term slope failure, a cause of landslides in nature, references movement or tearing of the soil, revealing the structure of what lies underneath. Noland equates this with an artistic tearing away at existing surfaces to reveal new surfaces below. "There are many things in the non-human part of nature that we humans see as echoes of our own situation and predicament," writes Noland. "This is just one of them." Noland's work also incorporates pattern, which to him exemplifies basic conditions of our existence: "Two people standing together, talking, have no identity without the space between them," he notes. "Similarly the continent of the Americas, for instance, would have no separate identity from Europe/Africa without the space provided by the ocean. The two situations (the couple, the continents) both rely equally on the spaces between, as well as the objects themselves, for definition... each are equal...neither are 'positive' or 'negative'."
Based in Kansas City, Garry Noland has exhibited extensively throughout the region as well as nationally for more than twenty years, most recently in a two-person exhibition at the Haydon Art Center in Lincoln, Nebraska. His work is included in public and private collections including those of the Anchorage Museum of History and Art, Anchorage, Alaska; Ever-Ready Battery Company, St. Louis, MO; Sprint Nextel Art Colleciton, Overland Park, KS; Grinnell College, Grinnell, IA; Continental Insurance Company, New York, NY; and Hallmark Cards, Kansas City.
