Kansas City, MO, February 16, 2023: Charlotte Street is pleased to present the upcoming exhibition clock:work, opening March 17, 2023, from 6-9 PM at the Charlotte Street Gallery. clock:work is a multimedia exhibition which treats sports as a source of inspiration while questioning the institutional bodies that oversee them. Featuring the work of Maryamsadat Amirvaghefi, Lyndon Barrois Jr., Tay Butler, Cesar Lopez, Abigail Smithson, Breanne Trammell, and Bradley Robert Ward, clock:work ranges from being critical to celebratory, exploring the individual elements that create a shared culture within sports. The exhibition will remain on view through April 29, 2023.
Sports do not solely exist on TV or in their respective courts and fields; sports are embedded into a shared international culture. Artist Derek Fordjour states that many artists “have grown up with the advent of the sports industrial complex. So artists, as cultural observers, would of course be influenced heavily by such a dominant force coming into view.” A generation of artists have now come of age with sports being intertwined with marketing and visual media. It is natural that an art movement would form from watching, playing and observing sports.
The process of responding to everything that sports embody and signify through art allows the maker to unpack institutional issues that exist in a myriad of ways. It is not the sports themselves that carry on ugly legacies of racism and imperialism, or even rouse feelings of nationalism, but also the institutions (such as the NFL, FIFA, or NCAA, to name a few) that oversee and support predatory practices for financial gains. The artists featured in this exhibition are all sports fans; they feel compelled to add their voices to the ongoing dialogue that centers culture around sports as a way to think critically about larger customs and institutions that perpetuate social injustices. The artists also acknowledge the small joys and beautiful moments of taking part in and watching sports.
Maryamsadat Amirvaghefi, 2021
clock:work centers on the timed and regulated structure of sports and art practices as a way of relating to society more broadly and sifting through the topics of iconicity, representation and injustices, both nuanced and overt. Just as games and races create a beginning and end using the shot clock, innings or starter pistol, the work of artists also lives within a self or intuitively imposed time frame, although sometimes more expansive and abstract than in sports. The featured work explores time constraints and our individual works. The artists search, collect, photocopy, cut up, appropriate, build, unravel, print and reprint, sew, stitch, wear, and reconfigure visual information that is previously been well played or understood within a certain context, all with the intended goal of encouraging viewers to reimagine previously agreed upon relationships to sports and their impact.
Programing
Opening Reception
March 17, 2023
6PM to 9PM
Charlotte Street Gallery
3333 Wyoming, KCMO, 64111
RSVP – https://bit.ly/clock-work
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.
View As PDF HERE
###
