FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Kansas City, MO / Overland Park, KS — The Kansas City Jewish Museum is pleased to present, Mark Cowardin: From the Ground Up, a solo exhibition featuring new large-scale sculpture by Kansas-based artist Mark Cowardin. This exhibition opens Sunday, November 8, 2009, at the Epsten Gallery at
Village Shalom with a public reception from 2-4 p.m. and an informal conversation with the artist in the gallery at 3 p.m. Mark Cowardin: From the Ground Up will remain on view through Sunday, January 3, 2010.

Mark Cowardin: From the Ground Up

Within the space of home exists an environment where simple, everyday objects and architecture shape our social and individual identities via memory, functionality, nostalgia and symbolic ritual. Our collective
understanding of this place is periodically in question, however, as generations simultaneously renegotiate it’s meaning through migration, displacement, different cultural points of reference, and ideas of usefulness.

Artist Mark Cowardin brings this environment into focus with a new body of work that defines the home as a specifically un-built environment. Neither quite here nor there, the conceptual spaces Cowardin creates with his sculptures and installations are mental thresholds for us to enter and consider various states of potential.

Cowardin approaches his subjects through the industrial complex of the building industry, namely construction materials such as actual two-by-fours and simulated cinder blocks, ductwork, and electrical switches. Using these and other forms as a type of workman’s visual language, Cowardin manages to
subvert them into ironic and conflicting metaphors for a sense of loss over the deconstruction of our historic surroundings and, simultaneously, to question the usefulness of nostalgia when balancing the scales of mass consumption and future sustainability.

Established in 1991, the purpose of Kansas City Jewish Museum of Contemporary Art (KCJMCA) is to provide innovative art exhibitions and related programming that engage seniors and diverse audiences from all segments of our community to enrich lives and celebrate our common humanity through art. KCJMCA realizes this goal through two projects: The Epsten Gallery at Village Shalom and through partnerships with local, regional and national institutions that engage in KCJMCA’s Museum Without Walls exhibition program.