House Painter

For a ceramics major, Travis Pratt sure knows how to paint. That’s not to say ceramists can’t paint, but talent in one medium doesn’t necessarily guarantee success in another. Pratt recently graduated from the Kansas City Art Institute, and the Nerman Museum has already purchased one of the paintings exhibited in House, which opened at the Late Show on January 4. Here, Pratt’s paintings of houses suggest a young artist who balances attention to formalist concerns with rich conceptual explorations.

In these acrylic paintings on paper and wood panel, Pratt examines what makes a home — as an object and as a concept. Not surprisingly, his impulse to paint abstract, fantastical and often Seuss-like structures emerges from emotional impulses. Pratt says he had been painting box shapes that slowly morphed into houses as he thought about isolation; what “home” represents; and how people, like homes, can be under construction, both physically and emotionally, throughout their lives.

The images of houses share an almost mystical quality: They float in the air attached to the bottom of the painting by a slender ribbon of color or by a small staircase, or they balance precariously on shape-shifting “shelves” of color. None seems to represent an actual house that could be inhabited, yet all share a certain modern sensibility. (A couple of them resemble architect Richard Neutra’s famed modernist houses.)

Because of his ceramics background, Pratt treats each panel painting as an object, paying attention to the sides of the wood. The works have presence yet don’t seem precious or gimmicky. They’re rich with varied paint textures, patterns and strokes. And their sense of isolation — each house inhabits the paper or canvas by itself, and no people are present — is balanced with a careful color choice or some other formal deliberation. In one painting on paper, in light grays and buffs, Pratt lightens the image’s potential loneliness by including delicate pink and cheerful yellow. He understands that you can’t paint a series of houses without the work suggesting all of the emotions of home and place, and he delivers the goods by showing a fertile and varied selection of sophisticated paintings that belie his youth and relative inexperience.

Also at the Late Show, Kansas City photographer Rusty Leffel’s Out of Kilter series of black-and-white images suggests the various methods that a culture develops to manage the impact of a seven-year war. Some photographs recall the Vietnam War protests — people holding “imagine peace” signs — but in general they depict a culture fractured by worry, exhaustion and bitterness. A small child holds a sign that reads, “Peace Now,” and it looks as if he’s been alive for as long as we’ve been at war. In Los Angeles, Leffel writes, the only peace symbol he could find was on a multistory fabric advertisement mounted on the side of a building: “Peace, Love, Gap.”