Mark your calendar: Saturday, June 25. Don’t miss SIX parties in Chase County!
It is all about the prairie, the earth, nature, everyday objects and humans. It’s about contemporary art.
Saturday, June 25, 2016, from 12 to 5 p.m., you are welcome to visit artist receptions for six new exhibitions of contemporary art at the following four locations:
Cottonwood Falls
Symphony in the Flint Hills Gallery – Bill McBride & Amanda Maciuba
Matfield Green
The Gallery at Pioneer Bluffs – Stephen T. Johnson & Tom Parish
Matfield Station Sculpture Prairie – Bill McBride with Jeroen van Westen & Anne Ausloos
The Bank Art Space – Luke Ball
Shows run from June 11 to July 31, in Matfield Green Friday, Saturday, Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., in Cottonwood Falls daily from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
More information:
In The Bank Art Space, Luke Ball: “I create images of isolated and desolate environments which are home to structures that hint at the presence of their creators, but never reveal them. Elements from my everyday life populate my work. The objects adorning these landscapes, such as muscle cars, construction materials, and domestic objects, are expressions of my personal visual vocabulary. My work is a symbolic depiction of the social and cultural spaces we occupy in life.”
In the Symphony Gallery, Bill McBride, a sculptor living in Matfield Green, works with natural and man-made materials he finds in the tallgrass prairie of the Flint Hills. His sculpture expresses his view that humans, nature and everyday objects evolve as equals from the creative energy of the ever-changing universe.
Also in the Symphony Gallery, Amanda Maciuba, a printmaker and bookmaker from Iowa at present working as artist in residence at the Lawrence Art Center and at the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve. Her work is concerned with how the effects of purposeful human actions, alongside uncontrollable factors of time and nature, alter both the current landscape and human agency within that landscape.
Just north of Matfield Green, Bill McBride is currently at work on a sculpture path, a joint effort with the Center for Living Education in Matfield Green and Wichita State University’s Art Department on the Flint Hills Scenic Byway. McBride’s installations and earth art by other artists will form Matfield Station Sculpture Prairie, opening to the public in 2017. McBride says, “The path invites people to experience the prairie and art at the same time.” On June 25, you are invited to a preview of two installations (collaborations with Dutch artist Jeroen van Westen and Belgian artist Anne Ausloos).
In The Gallery at Pioneer Bluffs, Stephen T. Johnson shows some of his visually arresting and conceptually rich body of work that forges connections between words, objects and ideas. His art spans a broad range of concepts, contexts and mediums including painting, collage, drawing, sculpture and installations. He is also well-known through his original award-winning children’s books.
Also at Pioneer Bluffs, Tom Parish, who se evocative and beautiful photographic art encourages a dialogue about Flint Hills native stone root cellars, and sheds a light on how they were built and functioned. Because very few of these arched-roof, subterranean structures are found outside this area of Kansas, they have become an icon of our region’s shared history and community.