new art through architecture “artboards” by jerry kunkel and adolfo martinez debut first friday december at missouri bank crossroads

The Missouri Bank Crossroads Branch, 125 Southwest Boulevard, will debut four new large-scale commissioned images, by Lawrence, Kansas-based artist Jerry Kunkel and Kansas City-based artist Adolfo Martinez on its Art through Architecture “Artboards” in time for First Friday December, 2010.

Jerry Kunkel‘s two west-facing images, titled Memories Are…, play with ideas of fact and fiction, past and present, the nature of memory, and the veracity of photographic representation.  Juxtaposing the front and back of a postcard against two views of the specific location it apparently depicts, Kunkel invites the viewer “to fill in the blanks, conjure a short response, and consider what may have transpired.”

Adolfo Martinez’s east-facing Artboards, titled We’re Not in Kansas Anymore, feature robots pulled from pop culture set amidst the Kansas City skyline: Robby the Robot, from the movie “Forbidden Planet,” Gort from “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” and robots from “Lost in Space,” “March of the Robots,” Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis, ” and a B movie called “Robot Monster.” While injecting a sense of humor and fantasy into the downtown landscape, this line-up of visitors from different eras and planets also offers a poignant portrait of changing cultural portrayals of the futuristic “other.”

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Read the article in The Kansas City Star

Read the article in The Vignette