“Vacuum Paradoxicon,” an enigmatic grouping of works by emerging Kansas City artists Amanda Gehin and Stewart Losee, features 34 paintings and sculptures that present hypothetical spaces in which contradictory conditions cohabitate. The exhibit is on view at the Urban Culture Project’s Project Space gallery.
The balance of past and future in Losee’s “Cargo Cults Parody, Corn Space Ship, 2099” produces strange but interesting results
For this work, he was inspired by the history of corn god worship by Mesoamerican cultures, U.S. military cargo planes dropping supplies in Papua New Guinea and Russian artist Pavel Pepperstein’s “Landscapes of Future” drawings. The piece also refers to “Western Cargo,” a book of drawings by Kansas City artist Russell Ferguson, Losee said.
Featuring a miniature arrangement of shaped wood, model trees and tiny figures, Losee’s parody shows a complex of whimsical architecture, a yellow spaceship resembling two intersecting ears of corn and a venerating crowd of people.
Continuing the spaceship motif, Losee’s “Solar Ark of Sound” beautifully pairs innovative and archaic musical technologies. Made with the help of friend Brent Cox, an experimental composition created with effects pedals and recorded on cassette tape plays through speakers loaded on a small wooden craft equipped with solar panels.
The droning noise — a cross between a boiler and a swarm of bees — provides a wonderfully eerie soundtrack for the exhibit.
In “Building Visions Manifest in Sky,” Losee couples drug-induced and computer-generated states of hallucination.
The compelling backlit poly-styrene print of a computer rendering of buildings suspended among clouds has affinities with visions purportedly produced by “ayahuasca,” a South American ceremonial drink. It also has affinities with the Internet-based virtual environment, Second Life, in which architecture is not always bound to the laws of gravity.
The light box lends the image a video-monitor appearance, while its structural embellishments recall the buildings in the cargo cult piece.
Gehin’s most captivating works are found within the 22 gouache and colored pencil drawings from her “Infinite Interior Series.” In these, impossible spaces are illustrated as probable. “Impossible Cage” best conveys the matter with an optical illusion that twists space as well as houses two rabbits.
Besides puzzles without solutions, Gehin drew inspiration from Jorge Luis Borges’ short story, “The Library of Babel,” in which a whole universe of rooms connected by corridors and stairways is described as paradoxically endless and limited.
Many of Gehin’s paintings feature blue stairs that imply spatial continuum but that never arrive at a way out. “Reluctant Rabbits on Unsure Stairs” provides an example of her ascending and descending steps better functioning as decorative pattern than as means of passage.
Two pedestals, each at opposite ends of the gallery, display Gehin’s three-dimensional works to dissatisfying effect. Here, the maquettes seem to be still in progress, which turns out to be the case. The artist said they are meant as sets for future stop-motion animations.
Perched atop one of the mossy islands in “Primary Penrose Chair” is a mini chair with a back made of Penrose triangles painted red, blue and yellow. What this piece, and the other sculptures in the exhibit, really has going for it is its endearing toy-like qualities.
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