Charlotte Street Foundation's Urban Culture Project presents Humanature, an exhibition featuring installations, sculptures, photographs, prints, and mixed media works that investigate relationships among humans and nature.
Raising questions about the definitions of "natural" and "man made," the boundaries implied therein, and the manners in which humans are disposed to representing "nature" as "other," this exhibition argues for a more expansive consideration. "Our influence over the natural world, and the impact this influence in turn exerts upon human civilization, make readily apparent the fact that we are, in fact, part of an ongoing natural process in which both choice and chance determine the outcome," writes curator B.j. Vogt. "It is relevant therefore to propose that humans exist as a natural event unfolding within the evolutionary timeline of the Earth."
Installed in a manner that invokes aspects of a natural history museum, the exhibition will feature several large-scale, dynamic installations including a giant volcano spewing Styrofoam "popcorn" by artist/curator B.j Vogt titled We Are Better Volcanoes than Volcanoes. St. Louis- based artist Cameron Fuller presents several works, including a display of many dozens of photographs of natural disasters, a museum-like diorama featuring a taxidermied coyote, and Remembering Washington, an ambitious installation comprised of a hand-made Kwaikutl-style costume and giant mask rendered as a wall-drawing, with a performative video playing in its mouth.
Other works include a series of Model Landscapes by Pittsburgh-based artist Carin Mincemoyer, for which she employs recycled plastic packaging as containers for synthetic landscapes that represent our cultural ideals: clean, well-behaved, and attractive; and a series of large-scale color photographs by Jamie Kreher (St. Louis), which depict suburban parking lot "islands" with their surrounding contexts erased, such that the strangeness of these tiny pockets of planned "nature" is amplified.
Detroit-based artist Eric Troffkin's Petal Dishes (sculptural hybrids of satellite dishes and colorful flowers) and Can You Hear Me Now? (a series of egg shaped objects with outmoded cell phone antennae) portray a world in which nature and technology have merged, while photographs by
David Johnson portray the co-mingling of human- and plant-life in domestic, office, and camping settings. Kansas City based artist Karen McCoy is represented by a series of prints created using natural pigments and her own body to mirror specific topographical features, such as My Thighs As Port Miou and My Elbow as a Boulder at Canon Beach, Oregon.
Charlotte Street Foundation is dedicated to making Kansas City a place where artists and art thrive. Through its Urban Culture Project initiative, Charlotte Street supports artists of all disciplines and contributes to city's vitality by transforming previously vacant spaces into dynamic venues for multi-disciplinary contemporary arts programming. For more information, visit www.charlottestreet.org.
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