All Terrain

ALL TERRAIN

Friday, July 6 – Saturday, August 11, 2018

La Esquina

1000 W 25th St

Kansas City, MO 64108

RADAR is proud to present the exhibition, ALL TERRAIN, featuring a selection of 2018 Charlotte Street Foundation Studio Residents. ALL TERRAIN investigates ideas of intimacy and vulnerability within our immediate landscape. Through image-making, sculpture and performance, these artists provoke questions surrounding our connectedness to the natural world and domestic space, prompting a search for the balance between the wild and the cultivated.

Charlotte Street Studio Residents featured in ALL TERRAIN included S.E. Nash, Glyneisha Johnson, Damien Randolph-Spader, Lilly McElroy, BOIBOY, ARGOT/NOTS, Matthew Johnson and Ruben Castillo.

ALL TERRAIN was in collaboration with Charlotte Street Foundation's Studio Residency Programming. 

Images below by E.G. Schempf.

The nine artists in ALL TERRAIN are all plugged into urgent moments in the contemporary discourse about what it means to move from the external to the internal, exploring environmental fallacy, domestic harmony, history, and our changing relationship to a progressing human world.

Two artists in particular anchor ALL TERRAIN to these central themes. SE Nash carefully contemplates the role nature plays in art, partially by incorporating loam into watercolor paintings. Wooden stakes connect a small and large panel together, providing a thematically appropriate visual bridge between materials. This raises questions about interpersonal environments: what grows naturally and what is transplanted, and how do we use this to inform our relationships? Lilly McElroy too challenges built and organic environments in the absurd video pair,“Woman Runs Through a Pastoral Setting” and “High Sierra”. Natural areas are curated and developed for McElroy’s strange agenda, their behavior manipulated for an effective punchline. Part of the sublime beauty of nature comes from our helplessness when faced with larger forces that govern the world. But this doesn’t deter McElroy from showing us the shortcut.

ARGOT/NOTS duo Logan Acton and Meghan Skevington harken back to still life arrangements in their installation. The irregular table is staged with objects that dramatize tensions between natural and artificial forms. Mortality is reimagined through new, mixed-organic mediums in this dynamic reference to historical still lifes. ARGOT/NOTS have captured decadence and bounty with 3D printed, cast and found vessels, and the deliberate composition becomes a conduit for a new relational narrative. Similarly, BOIBOY uses latch hooked sculptures to allude to outdoor shapes and colors with a variety of synthetic fibers. Appealing colors and textures become the entry into these pieces, their combination like a group of potted succulents. But the artificiality quickly becomes too dominant to ignore. Underneath all the stimuli and layered meaning, ARGOT/NOTS and BOIBOY breathe a playful spirit into ALL TERRAIN.

Similar concerns resurface in Damien Randolph-Spader’s graphite solar panels. These drawings layer a deep, cold void onto a plane that, in life, would be warm to the touch. We arrive at a disconnect, a broken bridge between two temperatures representing two environments. Solar panels are mediators between the energy the world provides and the energy humans adapted to require. It is a surprisingly neutral subject passionately rendered in Spader’s steady, weighted tool. Opposite, Matthew Johnson’s extreme sculptures reflect on what happens when interior spaces are thrown into chaos. The colors of conflict and disarray make appealing the ideas we would naturally avoid, like a domestic clash. But here it is embraced as a part of the intimate tapestry, because friction, strangely, belongs to a greater harmony.

Ruben Castillo and Glyneisha Johnson address intimacy and personal history by bringing other interiors into the gallery. When figures appear, they perform domestic tasks. Castillo fluffs pillows in a pacifying video, engaging, as a fluffer, in a ballet around the intimate link between public and private life. He brings more personal items into the show--shirts heavy under thick layers of graphite--to contemplate our receptivity or aversion to change. Glyneisha Johnson’s painted collages follow a more traditional compositional style to capture the walls and corners of an occupied home. Johnson addresses generations of homes built upon the work of only a few individuals, historically women, historically without compensation. As Johnson elevates these daily scenes, she delivers us a cultivated perspective of a long-standing cultural binary.

ALL TERRAIN merges the elements of an inside/outside dualism while celebrating the wildness of our changing relationship to what the earth delivers. Human relationships--to one another and to the world--are fraught with messy mistakes, beautiful violence, and triumphant recovery. If ALL TERRAIN has one message to deliver, it is that we will defy odds, logic, and rules just to get closer to one another.

–Annie Raab