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Jonah Criswell: RESIDE
opening reception friday,
sep 3 from 6-9p at the arts incubator's cocoon gallery
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sept 3 - 24, 2010 //
gallery open mon 11-2, thurs 4:30-7 + fri 11-5p
cocoon gallery
115 West 18th Street
Kansas City, MO 64108
816.421.2292
Reside functions as a two-part exhibition of paintings and drawings by
Jonah Criswell, in which Criswell continues an ongoing tradition of documenting
the everyday through a reexamination of the domestic setting. Avoiding common
associations with comfort and stability, Criswell navigates between unexpected
compositions, murky and brooding pallets, and an ever-present sense that these
familiar spaces contain more unfamiliar truths about human experience. Paintings
of rooms strewn with evidence of inhabitation
suggest states of tension,
and anxiety through off-kilter compositions and a fractured sense of time.
Graphite descriptions of the most banal home listings flicker between coming and
going, revealing potential intimacies, and simultaneous states of "hello" and
"goodbye". In The Poetics of Space,
Gaston Bachelard writes, "A house that has been experienced is not an inert box.
Inhabited space transcends geometrical space". Criswell explores
the home
as both inhabited and vacated, and depicts the home as a richly layered site in
which all aspects of human experience can be traversed.
The works
featured in Reside
explore the complexity of the home, and challenges the notion of the domestic
setting as common or banal by directly addressing nuances in seemingly ordinary
spaces. Common associations with comfort and familiarity are inverted as spaces
become charged with apparitions and traces of history and memory, while evidence
of anxiety and discomfort reflect a contemporary shift in American cultural
psychology. Each of these works highlights moments of transition, simultaneous
states of coming and going, lending the viewer an opportunity to pause, and
experience parallel conditions of duration through line, color, and composition.
Despite the permanent nature of the exhibition's title, Reside, a temporary nature
of daily experience is evident, suggesting the impossibility of the comfort and
stability that comes with a state of
permanence, perhaps revealing a very
current fear in Americans across a broad scope of cultural and economic
lines.
-
Erica Mahinay
ARTIST BIO:
Jonah Criswell earned his MFA from the
Pennsylvania State
University
School of Visual Arts. He also holds a BFA from the Kansas City
Arts
Institute. Criswell has shown frequently in the Kansas City metro
area,
as well as nationally and internationally, in NYC and Berlin,
Germany.
For more information or
additional
images, please contact:
Kristin Grossman,
kgrossman@artsincubatorkc.org
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About Arts
Incubator
The
Arts Incubator, located in the heart of Kansas City's Crossroads
Arts
District, is a non-profit organization whose mission is to foster
new
talent by providing access to costly equipment and facilities,
low-cost
studio space and a forum to teach the "business of art" to
member
artists.
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Arts
Incubator
115 West 18th Street
Kansas City, Missouri
64108
816-421-2292
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