Friday, May 31 through Saturday, June 29th, 2019
Melt
Charlotte Street Foundation — La Esquina — Opening May 31st 2019
Artists included: Bo Hubbard, B Becvar, Kelly Runningen, Trey Hock and Jaime David,
Lauren Louvel Louise Whitacre, 2007 Balquier, and William Plummer
Curated by Camile E. Messerley
We all wait, whether we are on-call and know something is coming or not;
while waiting we carry an ache or hope in anticipation of a delivery.
The artists you will come to know in the exhibition Melt are both in the process of waiting and are on-call. The artists carry the wait in objects and sensations— while they are seeking, discerning, and intuiting forms of being in-between it is important to know that their artworks are not a short term fix or a means to an end. The images and installations you will find in Melt are in their nature in-transition. The artists in Melt are unpacking and sifting through their documentation of home, of people who do and do not currently live in these homes with us, the people who have been removed from our homes, our geographic location, of their respective and collected solitudes.
In between the solitary yet often reciprocative feelings that come from the drip-drop-oobleck of time there is a tension sitting on a spectrum of experiences reaching between patience and empathy. When a popsicle melts you get juice, cold juice, but it’s sticky, not everyone likes to be sticky. A popsicle will melt in your mouth as you eat, but if it melts before you have it on your tongue why do you no longer want the sweet juice, because it’s messy? What about the form is so satisfying that it cannot possibly hold you the same way it did in its perfect rectangular shape?
What we ask of you in between now and Memorial Day is this:
“Don’t ask what the work is. Rather, see what the work does”
— Eva Hesse, German-born Sculptor.
2007 Balquier is an artist specializing in performance, video, and installation. They received a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2018, where they studied Converging Media and Digital Filmmaking. They recently attended the Art and Rural Environments Field School led by Richard Saxton and Mary Welcome. Their recent work engages with the complex relationship between identity and landscape, often utilizing site-specific video projections, atmospheric soundscapes, and poetic live performances.
Fifty-Four is the collaborative duo of Jaime David and Trey Hock. Living and working in Kansas City, Fifty-Four’s work attempts to create a space of quiet reflection and draws heavily on Trey and Jaime’s shared experience of home and the poignancy they find in simple actions and the everyday. Both are drawn to the patterns and processes of making, and much of the time Jaime and Trey will make work, in order to understand why they are making work. Often this results in a gesture that highlights the common object, the overlooked or the ignored. Sometimes making just results in making, as when they reroofed their house one summer. Even then making is more than just making. It is making due. It is getting by.
b becvar is an artist and writer based in Kansas City whose work seeks to immerse viewers within images and the process of the images refraction. They do so through both image making and the creation of immersive installations. They received a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2018 in the Filmmaking and Creative Writing department. They are currently focused on the color yellow.
Bo Hubbard was born and raised in Oklahoma City and moved to Kansas City in 2012 to attend KCAI; Bo completed his BFA from the Painting Department in 2016. During school, he interned at the Reading Reptile and assisted with the store’s transition into the Rabbit Hole. Bo was the Drawing & Painting Liaison at the Oklahoma Summer Arts Institute in 2015. He received the Ox-Bow School of Art Fellowship on behalf of KCAI in the summer of 2016. Bo recently completed the fall concentration at Penland School of Crafts where he was a teaching assistant for printmaking and papermaking. Bo is currently an artist in residence at the Charlotte Street Foundation.
William Plummer is an interdisciplinary artist based in Kansas City, Missouri. They are fascinated by the way objects can reflect culture, and by extension, a sense of place and belonging. They explore mutualistic relationships and systems through the growth, recycling, and reclamation of materials. Plummer is a graduate of the Kansas City Art Institute’s Fiber and Art History program. They are currently a studio resident at the Drugstore.
Kelly Runningen is an artist and writer from Milwaukee, WI living in Chicago, IL. In her most recent work, Runningen has been considering the ways in which people develop their own domestic utopias. Through material investigations and traditional textile processes such as quilting, printing, and knitting she aims to strike an uncanny balance between real and synthetic, genuine and contrived to place her viewer within a sentimental topography. Runningen received the Ox-Bow School of Art Fellowship on behalf of KCAI in the summer and fall of 2018 and holds a B.F.A from the Kansas City Art Institute’s Fiber program.
Lauren Louvel Louise Whitacre is an artist and musician from Chicago, Illinois who has relocated to Kansas City to complete her BFA at the Kansas City Art Institute, studying photography and creative writing. She went to Columbia college from 2009-2010 where she studied fiction writing and photography. From 2009-2015 she formed the band Sister Crystals and recorded an EP, little bits, and a self-titled LP that was released on Walk-In Records and Feeltrip Records. Whitacre uses photography as an act of preservation. Photographs are moments stuck in a purgatory state, moments that are continually lost. Whitacre believes the act of photographing is an act of death. She uses different methods of photographing to celebrate the intimacy in singledom, failed partnerships, generational gaps in family and death.
Camile E. Messerley is an arts organizer, independent curator, and writer from Omaha, NE. She is currently based in the Bay-area where she writes for Journal.FYI and is the co-director of the artist lecture series The Painting Salon.
