KC’s SCP snaps back to life after seven years with Current Works

%{[ data-embed-type=”image” data-embed-id=”” data-embed-element=”aside” ]}%

%{[ data-embed-type=”image” data-embed-id=”” data-embed-element=”aside” ]}%

Last year, five former members of the Society for Contemporary Photography — a nonprofit that dissolved in 2007, after almost a quarter century — came together to discuss reviving the organization. This past June, the new Kansas City Society for Contemporary Photography introduced itself with a show at Columbus Park’s Kiosk Gallery.

“We’re getting back to our roots as photographers,” KCSCP President Angie Jennings tells me. “We want to create a community with local artists, curators and collectors. Our main focus will be on local and regional artists.” The society, she adds, also wants to educate photographic artists about self-promotion, finding a place in the art world and knowing how to discuss their work.

Much of what’s on display in the renewed group’s Current Works – 2015, which went up at Haw Contemporary this month, speaks for itself and shows just how many area photographers have already started to figure out their place in the art world.

Jan Schall, the Sanders Sosland Curator of Modern Art at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, served as juror. Selection was blind, meaning that Schall chose 36 works by 33 people from nearly 200 images submitted with only titles and print sizes. Almost all the three dozen images in the second-floor gallery of Haw Contemporary make their own strong case for the individual talent at work. Taken together, though, Current Works is a stunning show — a quietly powerful presentation revealing a wide spectrum of styles, themes, compositions and techniques.

Schall’s statement unifies her selections under a simple rubric: the question “What does it mean to stop time in an expanding, whirling universe?” Each of the images, presented in individual frames and lined up along four walls, repeats that query to the viewer. These photos require you to pause before each scene, block out the rest of your visual field, set aside your thoughts, and use your eyes — eyes that have become inured to the constant movement of digital interfaces, often accompanied by sound. In a screen-driven culture, Current Works demands your willingness to discern the values, balance and forms that make up these images, then find a narrative in those things.

Because Schall has taken care not only with the images she has chosen but also with their arrangement in this space, it’s not hard to meet that demand. She has carefully composed the photos — which are generally of similar size, ranging roughly (but with a few exceptions) between 10 inches and 20 inches — into a logical succession. It is utterly delightful, in fact, to approach them in groups, finding similarities amid neighboring images.

Beginning clockwise, the first long wall holds only black-and-white prints or images washed into a monochromatic chill. In the latter camp is a Phil Peterson shot of a bluish-white concretescape that suggests the swirl of water (or the whir of skateboard wheels) with its curving cement seams. Next to this is Larry Benton’s “Dreaming of Hummingbirds,” a sepia-toned triptych that preserves a living specimen for our eternal admiration — and bridges Peterson’s shot to one by Chris Dahlquist. In “Spinners,” three children represent blurred joy as they hang on to a playground merry-go-round, dressed in the garb of fictive adventure: capes and cowboy boots. There’s similar centrifugal force in the beautiful, furious clouds of Stephen Locke’s “West Point Supercell.” The storm could be headed toward another impossibly huge landscape, “The Road Off Highway 191,” by Ernie Block, another view of awe-inspiring nature.

Humans return with Lea Murphy’s “Tension,” a view of someone’s ankles and feet poised backward on the edge of a diving board. The scene freezes a decisive moment for this would-be diver, the outcome of which is playfully withheld. The five swimmers in Chuong Doan’s “NhaTrang Beach,” bathed in the magical, golden tones of sunset, are held in a post-dive memento. The motion in the frame shows one of the figures gleefully defying gravity, at once launching up from the water and falling back to it.

These pairings continue throughout the exhibition, along with across-the-room dialogues in theme (birds, trees, transportation, industry), color and light. Pilar Law’s misty “The Space Between #22, Kansas” addresses brightness in a way that complements Mark Berndt’s untitled composition of a stark industrial wall slashed by a parallelogram of high-wattage light; together, they echo Peterson’s work and expose the viewer to the many gradations of subtlety possible in this medium.

Elsewhere, images focus on repeating forms. The architecture of a stairwell mesmerizes in “Vanishing Point,” by Derek Slagle, as do the mysterious, UFO-like disks in Fred Trease’s “Black Holes” and the electrical towers set along the undulating ridges of Laura Cobb’s “Glen Canyon.”

There’s no shortage of straightforward beauty. Tim Pott’s “Jazz,” a high-contrast study of razor wire spiraling off the grid of a chain-link fence — like music notes on a clef or a hard-to-decipher autograph — is printed on slightly off-white paper and makes a fascinating study of form. Here, as in most of the show’s other images, the simplest details provide the deepest enchantments.

Details also shape narrative in photos that are witty, haunting or both. There’s deadpan literalism in the packaged (and unwrapped) hair awaiting application along the top of the frame in Gloria Baker Feinstein’s “Beauty Salon,” and there’s something troubling about dark shadows and the heaped rust-colored cloth in Kenny Johnson’s “Boy in the Corner” (in which we must take the title figure’s presence on faith). Don Wilkison’s “Tonya” gives us a whole story with its easy-to-apprehend shot of a mail carrier caught in the rain and clearly loving it.

Anyone with a smartphone is an amateur photographer now. But our post-Instagram era is nevertheless made up of moments that defy easy capture. Current Works offers a potent reminder of what such moments look like when they’ve been stilled not easily but well. If there’s something for nearly everyone to admire here, it’s because there’s something of many of us in these shots.