Evan Barclay

Tethered: New Rising Artists is an art show curated by recent Kansas City Art Institute Graduate and painter, Evan Barclay. The show features work from four 2020 graduates from the painting department. by Evan Barclay, Kate Suchan, Kyrsten Prock, and Sienna Henson.  

Tethered explores the way the practices and processes of these artists’ changed while recreating a studio practice from home. Questions emerge from the work: How do we learn to redefine “home,” or gain a separate ideation from our first  nostalgic home? How does being confined to our living space shift our definitions of art and identity? How does the making of art or creativity shift when it is tethered to our living space? 

Viewers will enjoy the contrast of  pre-stay-at-home artwork beside a collection of each artists’ “tethered” work made since COVID-19. It’s an experience in the shifting sense of space, subject matter, and light as the artists respond to the shifting identity of  their individual situations.

Many simple aspects of life since the stay at home order was first evoked have either become muddied, or shifted entirely, especially the idea of “home.” Mostly notably, by age, time, or distance. 

Sienna Henson and Kyrsten Prock experience a large shift in scale, and in material manipulation. Kyrsten’s earlier work, “Embrace” is a large meter long work populated with hand-applied marks in watercolor, ink  and gouache with enough magenta to evoke a sense of a floral bursts of spring color. Their newest body of work, however, is a group of five untitled collages only five inches wide. These intimate pieces, while still floral shift to smaller, subtler moments with tight compositions and large amounts of black or white negative space reminiscent of sharp corners, shadows and hallways.  Likewise, Sienna Henson’s newest collection of work, an array of small collages on wood and paper, is almost completely colorless but relies heavily on careful, studied composition, sometimes valuing texture over tones of grey or black. Her titles explore the solitude of home with names like  Damp Dishcloth or Window at Night. Each shifts to more immediate, singular reference points. In place of expressive mixed media depicting a gulf coast in the moonlight, viewers are treated instead to the subtleties of blinds, and images of shadow v. light..

Kate Suchan’s work explores interior themes in a wholly unexpected way. Where her early work focused on a series of landscapes with titles like, “Rose Garden”, Suchan’s newer work features intense folk renderings furniture in white conte crayon, pencil, and charcoal on colored rice paper. Rather than composition, the work explores, decoration, texture and mark making. “For the music we like,” is one of a tall open cupboard you might expect to hold records or a vitrola, but it is empty.  The extent of decorations creates nostalgic space, a sense of home more immediate and familiar, the way a small child might sit on the floor and study an antique searching for mysteries from the past. Suchan celebrates the furniture with such personal importance they seem almost like portraits or even blueprints to build a future wooden support, waiting to be filled with people and good things.

Evan Barclay’s more recent work, such as his two x two foot abstract on raw canvas, “Sprouts I”  he references stimuli directly centered around the things people do  at home like water sprouts in a morning window. While his earlier work, paintings like, “Electric Boogaloo,” evoke a sense of painterly invention, the newer work, as with Prock and Henson, is entirely more reliant on geometric abstraction and to some degree observation of light and shadow and even moves forward into symbolic images and textures from life: a gestural coffee mug that evokes a sense of coolness, after a night of refills, or at the radiant glows one might expect from a computer screen, or gradient of light at dusk seamlessly applied, almost dyed, into the simple cotton canvas. Rich in color with intentional lines, the works seem to glow like dusk into a shadowed room.  

Directed by Polly Alice McCann: POLLY ALICE merges oil painting and soft sculpture with imperfect stitching to talk about the precarious weathering of time and relationships and the beauty of mending. Adjunct writing professor, curator, speaker, and creative consultant, she is also the founder and managing editor of Flying Ketchup Press. This show is due in part with thanks to Jan Jensen Artists for graciously letting us be the guest curators of the Mark Grover Gallery, new to the Overland Park Downtown scene. This beautiful new gallery is in a co-working office next to OP Farmers Market. The show will be up and open by appointment August 7th through September 30th