Kansas City, MO, December 8, 2022: The Artboards by artists Austin Dearth and Johanna Winters installed at 125 Southwest Boulevard will remain on viewthrough the end of the year. The Artboards program is a collaboration with the Crossroads Community Association that captures the creative spirit of the Crossroads neighborhood, serving as an alternative outdoor platform where artists’ work can be viewed during all hours of the day.
About Austin Dearth’s Artboards: These artboards are comprised of six black and white drawings, created through an intuitive process. Each line built upon the next creates undulating, shifting boundaries that makes rhythmic, map-like shapes, forming organic wave patterns that feel alive. They are subconsciously informed by the places he travels and his rich day-to-day experiences in the world. Ultimately, they might be meditations, the process of mark-making itself organically unfolding in the moment. This speaks to the flow of daily life, its repetitions, its twists and turns, and often, perhaps, the folding in of accumulated memory onto our present. We are all figuring it out as we go, each mark, each decision supporting the next. The images calling out to passersby to pause and contemplate the dense pattern and implied movement.
Left – EN CAYSS UV ROMANSS (GARDIN FOWNT)
Right – EN CAYSS UV ROMANSS (SWOPE FOWNT)
Image photo credit: Grace Powell
Johanna Winters says about her Artboards: EN CAYSS UV ROMANSS is a new body of work comprised of videos, photos, and sculptural props that consider the condition of a puppet-protagonist who totters between keening self-pity and private indulgences. She doubles as both hero and buffoon while performing her sensuality for the camera.
In this work I manifest as the protagonist’s embodied chaperone as she anxiously navigates environs devoid of human presence. The two Artboard images are an extension of this work, and were shot in distinct locations within Kansas City, MO – the Rose Garden Fountain at Loose Park, and the Swope Memorial Fountain, respectively. These stagings suggest the protagonist’s yearning to be noticed and regarded as a desired subject.
ABOUT AUSTIN DEARTH
Austin Dearth, b. 1991, is a visual artist based in the Kansas City metro area, practicing out of Imagine That!, an art studio for artists with disabilities in the Crossroads Arts District. With a sharp eye for layering intricate, patterned line work, Dearth creates abstracted, map-like, topographic landscape drawings based on his travels both near and far with his family. Dearth uses ink, watercolor and markers to explore the geometric patterns found in nature, mechanics and technology. Dearth has exhibited his work at NCECA 2018, Troost Gardens Gallery, H&R Block Artspace as well as at the Imagine That! exhibition space.
ABOUT JOHANNA WINTERS
Johanna Winters engages puppetry, video, printmaking, and performance to dispatch anxieties about aging in a female body. Johanna holds an MFA from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, and a BA from the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. She has been awarded residencies at the Corporation of Yaddo, Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency, Lawrence Arts Center, ACRE, Vermont Studio Center, Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts, Guttenberg Arts, and Eugeniusz Geppert Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław, Poland.
Johanna’s work has been exhibited and performed nationally – recently at the Charlotte Street Foundation, (Kansas City, MO), Drama Club (Chicago, IL), Coop Gallery (Nashville, TN), Soo Visual Arts Center (Minneapolis, MN), and Open Eye Figure Theater (Minneapolis, MN). Johanna is the current Grant Wood Fellow in Printmaking at the University of Iowa, School of Art & Art History.
Prior to her artistic pursuits, Johanna trained as a professional cross-country skier and competed on an Olympic-development ski team based in the upper Midwest.
ABOUT CROSSROADS COMMUNITY ASSOCIATION
The mission of the Crossroads Community Association shall be to support, promote, advance, and encourage the revitalization of the community as a thriving, safe and attractive center of art, history, enterprise, commerce, culture, residence, entertainment, education and other activity; to inform and educate the members of this association and the public about community issues; to provide a forum to address community objectives and issues; to build a strong community through communication, cooperation, planning and leadership; to build a strong partnership between business owners, property owners, tenants and residents to ensure community involvement; and to enhance the quality of life within the community. For more information visit https://kccrossroads.org/about/cca/
ABOUT ARTBOARDS
The Crossroads Artboards were launched in fall 2008 as a partnership between Charlotte Street Foundation and Missouri Bank (now BOK Financial). The Artboards program is currently supported in part by the Crossroads Community Association. Over 100 Kansas City area artists have been featured on the ARTBOARDS to date. For a complete listing and more information, visit https://charlottestreet.org/awards/crossroads-artboards/
ABOUT CHARLOTTE STREET
Charlotte Street centers Kansas City’s most forward-thinking visual artists, writers, and performers—acting as the primary incubator, provocateur, and connector for the region’s contemporary arts community, and its leading advocate on the national stage. Since 1997, Charlotte Street has distributed over $2 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.
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