ARTSPEAK RADIO 2019

Wednesday January 2, 2019 noon – 1pm 90.1fm KKFI Kansas City Community Radio www.kkfi.org

Host/producer Maria Vasquez Boyd welcomes author David Hanzlick, photographer/queer disability activist Kathyrne Husk, & artist Patrick Jacobs.

Author, David Hanzlick, is Director of Program and Development for Sheffield Place, a treatment and transitional living program for homeless mothers and children in the Kansas City area. He also serves as an adjunct faculty member in the Nonprofit Leadership Studies Program at Rockhurst University and the Hauptmann School of Public Affairs at Park University. Hanzlick is a historian and holds a PhD in Political Science and History from UMKC. His doctoral research explored the history of women’s activism in Kansas City in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Hanzlick’s book Benevolence, Moral Reform, Equality: Women’s Activism in Kansas City, 1870-1940, is a study of women’s activism in the Kansas City community within the national context. It traces the rise of women’s activism in Kansas City during its post-war golden age of population and industrial growth. During this period, women of varying backgrounds emerged from the domestic sphere to claim space as full participants in their community, state, and nation through activism on behalf of benevolence, moral reform, and gender equality.

For more information: https://upress.missouri.edu/9780826221629/benevolence-moral-reform-equality/

Patrick Jacobs: Nocturnes
January 11 – March 2, 2019

Exhibition Opening Reception: Friday, January 11 from 5 – 8 p.m.

The KCAI Crossroads Gallery: Center for Contemporary Practice is pleased to present Nocturnes, by Patrick Jacobs. This exhibition presents a room of special lens dioramas, a.k.a., Nocturnes created by Jacobs during his residency at KCAI. Each nocturne, or moonlit landscape, is constructed in miniature, mounted within the walls of a freestanding room and viewable through circular glass lenses. Inspired in part by the mysterious landscapes of artists Hercules Segers and Ralph Blakelock, the exhibition explores the idea of landscape as a construct of human desire.

Recreated ‘moonlight’ provides the primary light source for panoramic, tightly cropped, intimate scenes. Some depict subject matter naturalistically, while others will verge on abstraction. This room within a room installation will reveal the unfinished structure as well as the exposed backsides of each diorama. These hallucinatory gardens of the imagination reflect a strange and wondrous beauty. Confronted by a fusion of dissimilar images, we are drawn into spaces at once determinate and infinite, natural and contrived, prosaic and otherworldly. Reality is de-familiarized, and the uncanny is supplanted by the commonplace.

For over seventeen years, Jacobs has created miniature scenes while looking through a pair of biconcave lenses. He discovered this process by placing a small concave lens in the wall of an architectural model. By peering into the model with an altered sense of reality, he discovered a vivid visual transport within that constructed space.
Using tweezers, pliers, brushes, and knives, he builds landscapes often with the help of assistants, creating by hand over a period of time, each petal, blade of grass, and twig. He improvises with scraps of aluminum foil mounted to shaped plywood to form distant bodies of water. White cat hairs painstakingly cut and glued together become dandelion seed heads.

Jacobs describes these works as “transportation devices,” for, they move us spatially from outside to inside and out again until we finally find ourselves in a psychic terrain of another world. By bending light, the lenses make objects farther away seem more distant, and conflate two- and three-dimensions into a strangely tactile reality.

Weeds, fungi, fairy rings, stumps and slime molds symbolize nature’s anti-heroes on a metaphysical journey through fictive and illusory landscapes. His inspiration stems from popular home & garden publications, pest control manuals, historical landscape painting from the Renaissance to the 19th Century, as well as on sidewalks in his neighborhood.

Patrick Jacobs was born in California. He intentionally blurs boundaries between the traditional artistic media of painting, sculpture and photography in his works. At the same time his dioramas, viewed through glass lenses, present the viewer with a spatial and perceptual conundrum; we are drawn into a space at once determinate and infinite, natural and contrived, prosaic and otherworldly.

KCAI Crossroads Gallery: Center for Contemporary Practice
1819 Grand Boulevard, Kansas City, MO 64108
Public Hours: 12 – 5 p.m. Tuesday – Friday, Saturday by appointment.

For more information please contact Michael Schonhoff at [email protected] or 816.914.5394

Kathryne Husk is an award-winning and nationally exhibited fine art conceptual figurative photographer and queer disability activist whose work focuses on using femme and non-binary bodies to initiate a dialogue about issues facing the disabled. They were the recent subject of the short documentary “Kathryne: Uncensored”, and their artwork has been published in various literary journals and art magazines. Kathryne’s activist work has lead to numerous lectures and presentations on disability rights and issues facing the disability community. Their current focus is breaking down the barriers of how disabled bodies are viewed in contemporary art and in society, and bringing awareness to the lack of accessibility within the Kansas City arts scene.

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