They Play Well With Others
Thoroughly different, the engaging four artists who won prestigious Charlotte Street Foundation Awards this year have their works combined to excellent effect in a group exhibition at Grand Arts. As it has for the past 10 years, the Charlotte Street Foundation financially rewards Kansas City artists for their artwork, also providing them an exhibition and an accompanying brochure. (This year the essay is written by Julie Rodrigues Widholm, a curator from Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art.) It’s a coveted local accolade with national exposure for the artists, whose works are seen by outside curators.
The pieces really work together despite their differences. Each artist’s strength is illuminated by proximity to the others; each piece tends to dominate the space but doesn’t overpower or crowd the others. It shouldn’t work, but it does.
James Trotter’s exuberant installation includes multiple drawings in his cartooning style and a site-specific piece in which he has crowded onto a wooden platform dozens of plastic toys, decorations, Mr. Peanut plastic banks, vintage games and similar items. Trotter aligns himself with artists who collect and then use those collections in their work; Portia Munson, Andy Warhol and Christian Boltanski come to mind. Obsessive in nature, the piece suggests the intense interest that we have in things. Lined up on a table, these toys, games and tchotchkes evoke cheerful nostalgia — who doesn’t feel charmed by hundreds of smiling plastic faces? — and a claustrophobia that’s not unpleasant.
Jessica Kincaid’s small, beaded tapestries similarly emerge from a personal tradition — she collected beads as a child. These diminutive scenes, made entirely from glass beads and silk thread, derive from memories, biblical scenes and imagination: a small girl “Sleepwalking in the Garden,” pairs of animals wandering through “Noah’s Ark.” Displayed on waist-high, tilted pedestals, the pieces are almost irresistibly touchable. Of these artists, only Kincaid has an M.F.A., from Michigan’s venerable Cranbrook Academy of Art. Compared with Cody Critcheloe’s nearby video, which is predictably filled with drama and pastiche, Kincaid’s pieces seem the more subversive for their unexpected, understated pleasure.
Critcheloe’s video gets a theatrical presentation, displayed between red drapes. “Who’s That Woman” doesn’t dominate the space, though it could. With his band, the Ssion, Critcheloe’s work embraces, as he puts it, “a queer utopia and the rise and fall of the American dream.” In general, it incorporates components of punk, dance, MTV and other significant cultural markers. Critcheloe was reared in Kentucky; his performance persona seems a loud rejection of the conservative Southeast, which can make Kansas City look wildly liberal by comparison. Shot in black-and-white, with drawing in the background (which is typical of his work), this 10-minute film presents individuals (some glistening, shirtless young men, Critcheloe in a blond wig, and others) talking about their relationships with a particular woman. Films like this can often feel distant and disconnected — too cool, too focused on aesthetics (or anti-aesthetics) over content. Yet, despite its deliberate flamboyance, the piece has a humanizing earnestness to it.
Emily Sall’s large wall installation, “BOOM-BURG,” made from adhesive vinyl attached to the wall, is a quiet and steady counterpoint to the visual and likable cacophony of Critcheloe’s and Trotter’s pieces. Sall arranges vinyl strips in lines, curves and other formations; the overlap of green, blue, black and red stripes creates a dimensional-looking space on this flat area of wall. Deceptively simple in appearance, the piece is a complex approach to spatial relationships.
This thoughtful installation is a must-see.
