Front/Space’s Hot Hands fundraiser is a big deal for art spotters and collectors

For a little more than five years, Front/Space has been an alternative showcase for artists, musicians and vendors in a matchbox-size storefront on 18th Street, booking projects whose ambition is often impressively out of proportion to this small Crossroads room. There was, to name one especially affecting event, The Cissy Room, Chloe Coover and Molly Hewitt’s interactive installation exploring sexuality and long-distance communication. There was the collective groove of the Rev. William Ellis Bradley, J. Ashley Miller and Joey Watson jamming on handmade, solar-powered instruments.

Co-directors Madeline Gallucci and Kendell Harbin, who took over the space in 2014, are now working with a peer art space to raise programming funds for 2016. The Drugstore — midtown’s storied former Katz (later Osco) drugstore on Main Street — is a far roomier but no less subversive address, a haven for the artists who rent studios inside. It’s a natural place, then, for Saturday night’s Hot Hands fundraiser, where 22 emerging and established artists will show support for Front/Space by live-drawing new art for very affordable sale. Here’s your chance to own unique works for about $30 apiece, some made by artists who have exhibited internationally. Some of the names — Gary Noland, Misha Kligman, Amy Kligman, Corey Antis, Kelsey Wroten — are familiar to devoted gallerygoers. Among the relatively below-the-radar talents whose art is often fascinating are the five listed below. Altogether, it’s a powerhouse bill not to be missed.

ANDY OZIER

If you drove by Missouri Bank in the Crossroads in 2015, you saw Ozier’s “Everybody’s Talking (about our BBQ),” a paper collage that made it onto that institution’s longtime rotating showcase of talent, the artboards. The work was a riot of floating faces and meat-filled speech bubbles, the figures sporting blue hair and yellow and orange skin, with cut paper and ink lines making up their faces. In this barbecue mecca, it was right at home — and of a piece with other Ozier works, which, taken together, feel like cheating on a vegetarian diet. Without straining to shock or emphasize gore, Ozier’s studio sketches hinge on absurdly profane and comical meat-infused text and images, with body parts replaced by torn paper scraps, and gaps in line filled in with crayon, colored pencil and other mark-making tools. The contrast of the flat lines and the volume-adding paper produces wacky nudes with accentuated proportions and foreshortened appendages. Hair is either an outlined helmet or a droll series of marks indicating individual strands. Breasts are jagged and disconnected from the torso, but large and important. The masses of the body, like the back of a thigh or the imposing girth of the shoulders, are rotund and meaty pieces of colored paper. What sounds maddeningly incorrect, however, is just Ozier working to find the most effective and immediate solution to the problem of capturing a 3-D figure in a 2-D medium. It’s a lot to chew on.

ALEX SAVAGE

The first things you might see visiting Savage’s studio are crude re-creations of popular Pokemon characters, sometimes paired with nonsensical phrases. It’s not that Pikachu holds special significance for Savage — it’s simply an easy millennial touchstone. Savage has also spent a lot of his recent time drawing Yoshi — the Mario Bros. green dinosaur with a red saddle — in Adobe Illustrator. (He says Yoshi is a nice shape to work with.) Meanwile, Savage’s paintings superimpose high art with low culture, blending macabre Goya masterpieces with Garfield comic strips. (Dimwitted cat owner Jon consuming his surly orange feline is one of Savage’s most disturbingly hilarious creations.) He also thinks a lot about what constitutes art and conversation in the social-media age. As he puts it: “How can I take out as much information as possible and still have something retain meaning? And I realized, Oh, yeah, that’s what a meme is.” So: popular song lyrics and stilted, unpunctuated conversations in text-messaging style commingle with visual wisecracks. To Savage, there is poetry in the blending of such text and image.

SARABETH DUNTON

I’ve been keeping a close eye on Sarabeth Dunton for the last year, following accounts of her journey around the United States and the wisdom she has acquired along the way. Her return to Kansas City is a huge win for the art scene, and it seems her travels have influenced her art in spectacular ways: the contemplative landscapes in her paintings, black voids invading sandy backdrops, highly concentrated marks depicting faraway bodies of water or distant lush grass or the yawning black sky above the lonely camper as she lies awake under the stars. Her abstractions remain close to the heart, and the human elements shine through like the dawn’s first light in the desert. It will be exciting to see what she produces during a live drawing event, given that her paintings are time-consuming and filled with painstaking line work.

RODOLFO MARRON III

Rodolfo Marron III produces his muted illustrations on a rosy cream paper that further subdues the already delicate colors he favors. His featherweight touch distributes subtle tones in each painted leaf and petal from his outdoor errands, on which he collects wildflowers, pokeberries, insect wings and matter he finds strewn across the ground. He locates characters within these collections, such as “Poke Ghost,” a creature with good intentions who sometimes strays off the trail. Native American stories find their way into Marron’s work, whether he is referencing a specific ritual of consuming and purging poisonous weed, or experimenting with the transmutation of flora and fauna into guiding spirits. Shrines made of fallen insects are surrounded by a halo of dried lavender buds and painted above fields in bloom, obscuring the Poke Ghost and his invasive presence. Woven narratives of the natural and spiritual worlds give this work the distinct aura of belonging to something beyond this dimension. Possessing a piece of this mythology would be less like claiming ownership than like the borrowing of something ephemeral and destined eventually to retreat back into the earth.

FLANNERY CASHILL

Cashill has been a fixture in the zine community for a long time, putting out books about writers, poets and feminists, sometimes illustrated with naked women. Her most recent and widespread illustration — for the first-ever Kansas City Zine Con, last August — showcased her knack for the absurd, with its alien fetuses, sci-fi landscapes and characters enjoying their own intergalactic tiny zines. It’s a heartwarming if not absolutely bizarre bill for the event, with eye-catching colors and consistent line work. Her “Look Book” nudie calendars are similarly humorous, even when the drawings border a greater strangeness. Naked, wide-eyed, smiling women, yes, but some seem to have recently committed harakiri or swallowed a bad batch of psychedelic drugs. Looking at this calendar turns marking the days into an act of voyeurism, with some scenes mundane and others gruesome. Cashill has a reclusive online presence — if you don’t find her in public, you won’t find her — so Hot Hands is a serious opportunity for her fans and fans-to-be.