KANSAS CITY, MO, March 5, 2020: Charlotte Street is excited to announce the new Crossroads Artboards for the 2020 spring season in the heart of Kansas City’s Crossroads District. The newly installed Artboards can be found above BOK Financial’s Crossroads branch at 125 Southwest Boulevard in Kansas City, MO. As Kansas City begins to heat up and attract more walking traffic, downtown pedestrians and arts patrons will be able to see new creative works from local artists Megan Ganey, Megan Pobywajlo and Max Wagner.
The new Artboard designs will display above BOK Financial through May of 2020. The exterior, double-sided Artboards will be visible to the public all hours of the day above BOK Financial (formerly branded as Mobank), who has collaborated with Charlotte Street in the innovative Artboards program since 2008.
When asked about her work for the Artboards, Megan Ganey stated, “In my El Paso series, I use
the layers between family history and detachment to create a space for
reinvention, producing surreal representations of interpersonal interactions.
This work is vibrant, warm and embracing, inviting the viewer to explore a
place between the past and the present. Originating from a box of negatives
that belonged to my great-grandmother Flora, this work, much like El Paso and
the history it holds as “the pass,” is the passage of a practice between
generations, an alternative reality that tethers me to Flora. This alternative
reality romanticizes the past, while remaining familiar to present experiences.
This scene evokes the early advertisements for Kodak consumer cameras, and the
story is one of timeless possibility, of access, of security and joy, of
the American Dream.
In a time when the definition of the American Dream is being challenged, when
the current administration is deciding who is worthy to not only live the
dream, but dream the dream, these images remind me that, without context, we
see ourselves and our relationships represented through the universal nature of
the human experience. This alternative reality, our detachment from the past,
allows us to reshape these narratives to contemplate the present.”
Megan Ganey is a multimedia visual artist living and working in Kansas City, Missouri. Her work involves layering color and images to create surreal representations of interpersonal interactions, reality and identity. Megan earned her BA in Photocommunications from St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas in 2011. Megan recently exhibited her work in her first solo show, El Paso, at Kansas City Artists Coalition’s Snap Space Gallery in April 2019; and co-curated (with Kadie Nugent) Terms of Use at the Art & Design Gallery at the University of Kansas in October 2019.
In regards to her Artboards collaboration with Max Wagner, Megan Pobywajlo said, “Our Artboard images are an exercise in mindful play. Using both billboards, we have created a colorful continuous still life photograph. With its simple, rectangular shapes and swatches of bright color, our photograph will take on an energetic and architectural feel at billboard scale.
Made with waste foam scraps and second-hand interior paint samples, we have built a careful arrangement that is free from hard and fast rules; playful and harmonious. Like placing stones in a zen garden, we have taken turns choosing colors, shapes, light, and shadow. In responding to each other’s ‘marks’ we’ve leveled hierarchies and built a shared vision.
Our Artboards, like much of our collaborative work, were made with the goal of looking deeply and thinking about how art and advertising operate in the world.”
Since 2013, the two have worked as Archive Collective to strengthen Kansas City’s photo community, pool resources, and create opportunities for our peers. This included local and traveling exhibitions, publishing projects, a photographer’s residency, critique nights, and more. In 2016, they began to work towards a collaboration as artist/photographers, not just as organizers.
The two artists currently make large-scale still life photographs that combine the languages and techniques of commercial photography with mindful play. They use locally available materials, food, and second-hand, seemingly disparate objects. These can be things natural and transient, plastic and permanent, common or rare, but often, they are objects that are elegant in their imperfection. To make their photographs they take turns choosing objects and colors, shapes and scale, light and shadow. In responding to each other’s ‘marks,’ they level hierarchies, build a shared vision, and deepen their individual understandings of how art and advertising operate in the world.
Megan Pobywajlo is a photographer and adjunct faculty member in the Photography department at the Kansas City Art Institute. In 2019 she received the Charlotte Street Foundation’s Visual Artist Award and exhibited her work in the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art.
Max Wagner is an artist and commercial photographer with a specialty in artwork documentation. He works with local and national clients, artists, collections, and institutions including the KCAI Crossroads Center for Contemporary Practice, H&R Block Artspace, and the Kansas City Ballet.
ABOUT CHARLOTTE STREET
Charlotte Street identifies the needs and fuels the evolution of an ever-changing multidisciplinary arts ecosystem, acting as its primary provocateur. Charlotte Street cultivates the contemporary, the exceptional, and the unexpected in the practice of artists working in and engaging with the Kansas City art community. Since 1997, Charlotte Street has distributed over $1.5 million in awards and grants to artists and their innovative projects, and connected individual artists to each other and to the greater Kansas City community. For more information about Charlotte Street, its awards, programs, and initiatives, visit www.charlottestreet.org.
ABOUT THE CROSSROADS ARTBOARDS
The Crossroads Artboards were launched in the fall of 2008 when the Mobank purchased the building that currently houses its Crossroads Branch and renovated and converted the building’s existing double-sided billboards into a highly visible site for work by area artists. The project was completed by Helix Architecture + Design. In 2018, Mobank was rebranded to BOK Financial. For a complete listing of artists featured and more information, go to www.charlottestreet.org/opportunities/artboards
Read the release in PDF format here.
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