The Kansas City Jewish Museum is pleased to present Larry Thomas: Ploys & Decoys, a solo exhibition of new large-scale mixed media paintings and portfolio prints by Kansas-based artist Larry Thomas. This exhibition opens Sunday, January 17, 2010, at the Epsten Gallery at Village Shalom with a public reception from 2-4 p.m. and an informal conversation with the artist at 3 p.m. in the Village Shalom Social Hall. Larry Thomas: Ploys & Decoys remains on view through Sunday, February 28, 2010.
Kansas-based artist and long-time Johnson County Community College Professor and Art Department Chair Larry Thomas presents Ploys & Decoys, a new solo exhibition of large-scale mixed media paintings, and portfolio prints. Within this new body of work, Thomas combines digital and actual collage with traditional painting techniques and state-of-the-art printing methods to address the concept of camouflage as a means of both concealing and revealing thoughts, ideas, and emotions.
Neither abstract nor entirely representational, Thomas’ images exist in an in-between realm, where close inspection reveals forms that flutter and swirl into recognition. Thomas uses the visual language of camouflage to remind us of its usefulness as an “immune system” in the management of everyday life among the natural world, within war’s industrial complex, throughout our society’s popular culture, and as we individually negotiate the social situations of daily life.
Mindy Goodman: Evidence of the Hand in Time
The Kansas City Jewish Museum is pleased to continue Mindy Goodman: Evidence of the Hand in Time, a display of thirteen new and recent mixed media sculptures and two-dimensional works by Kansas City-based artist Mindy Goodman. This body of work, which originally went on display November 8, 2009, will remain on view through Sunday, February 14, 2010, in the KCJMCA Project Cases of Epsten Gallery at Village Shalom.
In Mindy Goodman: Evidence of the Hand in Time, the artist presents several of her latest biomorphic mixed media sculptures and two-dimensional works inspired by the narrative potential of found materials and the art of basketry. Built from manipulated strips of reclaimed and recycled fabric, reeds, staples, pigments, and other items, these forms are suggestive of the human body and internal organs while remaining elegantly and elusively abstract.
“I became intrigued with marks left by hand and time upon fabric while studying textiles at the University of Kansas,” says Goodman regarding her initial inspiration behind this body of work. “Such details can tell the life story of cloth. Conceptually, this is important to me. I endeavor to contain my story, through evidence of hand, within the vessels I create.”