ARTSPEAK RADIO with Regina Daniel and Sherry Leedy

ARTSPEAK RADIO, Wednesday, February 10, 12noon – 1pm CST, 90.1fm KKFI Kansas City Community Radio, streaming live www.kkfi.org

Producer/host Maria Vasquez Boyd welcomes author/photographer Regina Daniel and gallery owner/Director Sherry Leedy.

REGINA DANIEL specialized in urban exploration photography. She is also the owner and operator of Red Vixen’s Photograpy. Covering much of the Kansas City area and the surrounding vicinities, she has gone on to travel through six states in the Midwest doing her abandoned photography. What started as curiosity for the abandoned has turned into documenting the forgotten or lesser-known history lessons and photographing what has stood the test of time. That change from curiosity to preservation led her to write the books Abandoned Kansas City and Abandoned Picher, Oklahoma. Regina’s passion to photograph the abandoned will continue to have a driving force as long as progression continues to leave the old and obsolete behind for better and brighter tomorrows.

The crossroad of the Midwest, Kansas City has grown from a small town to the large metropolis that it is today. As infrastructure has done nothing but expand, some businesses, schools, and even homes have been left for larger and sometimes newer locations that can accommodate the increasing population and the demand of today’s consumer. New schools are built, and businesses move on, but what happens to these structures after they have served their purpose? For many of us, known as urban explorers, these buildings still have a story to share. Despite the risks and dangers of structural integrity and law enforcement, urban explorers still pursue the history left in their remnants. These photos show the stories of schools that now sit as reminders of days gone by, and of business that once brought in happy customers only to face permanent closure. This book is an altruistic reality of how expansion pushes these buildings into obscurity and decay.

Red Vixen’s Photography
@RedVixPhotography  · Photographer

SHERRY LEEDY, owner Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art is the heart of First Friday’s in the Crossroads Arts District, Kansas City’s center of cultural activity. On the First Friday of every month throughout the year, rain or shine, art venues and shops in the Crossroads invite the public to attend an evening of new exhibitions, events and performances free of charge. First Friday has become the ultimate urban art celebration creating excitement and enthusiasm as well as focusing national attention on the high quality of art in Kansas City.

Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art
2004 Baltimore Avenue Kansas City, Missouri 64108
phone: 816-221-2626
Hours: 11am – 5 pm Tuesday – Saturday by appointment.
www.sherryleedy.com

REBECCA RUTSTEIN: Topographies of Time
“As a multidisciplinary artist who often collaborates with scientists, travels on expeditions at sea to create works that shed light on the natural world, works with data, and tries to connect the viewer with places and processes hidden from view, this body of work is an inward pivot – each painting, a personal meditation. I hope to capture these distortions of time, flurry of emotions, fluctuations as I drag the paintbrush to the beat of my own breath. Time is passing, a time less linear and more dimensional.” –Rebecca Rutstein

Philadelphia based artist, Rebecca Rutstein, explores abstraction inspired by her interest in geology, microbiology, marine science and the undercurrents that continually shape the physical world. Her paintings incorporate structural networks that articulate patterns found in nature, data, maps, micro and macro, handmade and mechanized, linear and solid. These visual experiences shed light on places and processes normally hidden from view and engage the viewer with a heightened connection to these enigmatic worlds. Through ongoing collaborations with scientists, much of her recent work has focused on mapping data of the deep sea seeking to illuminate a hidden world.

In her new series of work, Topographies of Time, Rutstein’s language of abstraction and exploration of hidden networks pivots inward, as she reflects on the impact of recent events on our experience of global interconnectedness. She suggests that our shared experience of time has shifted, stretched, bent and slowed, or alternately become frantic in fits and starts, as normalcy has been superseded by world events. Many of Rutstein’s paintings incorporate cellular networks of forms, lines or bands of colors that reveal an experience of time that is changing, elongating and warping as routines shift and days blur their boundaries. The series is a record of altering emotional states during the global pandemic: feelings of containment, anxiety, gratitude and new possibilities.

With over 25 solo exhibitions, Rebecca Rutstein has exhibited widely in museums, institutions and galleries throughout the United States and is the recipient of numerous awards. Her work is in the public collections of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts Museum, Temple University, Johns Hopkins Hospital & Albert Einstein College of Medicine, among others. Public commissions include Convergence, AT&T/Mural Arts Program, Philadelphia, PA, 2019 and Sculptural Commission, Yale University, Yale Science Building, New Haven, CT, 2019 and numerous others.
Rebecca Rutstein holds a BFA from Cornell University (with study abroad in Rome) and an MFA from University of Pennsylvania. She has been a visiting artist at museums and universities across the US and enjoys speaking about the intersection of art and science.

JEFF ROBINSON: Nostalgias
“I believe that art, like the moments captured in these images, is alchemy. Lightning in a bottle. In this collection, my goal was to take singular, idiosyncratic elements and create a unified whole through the transportive power of nostalgia. I hope you enjoy the journey.”

- Jeff Robinson, 2021

SLCA is pleased to present our inaugural exhibition of paintings by Jeff Robinson, Nostalgias. In this series, of black and white and gray large-scale paintings and intimate works on paper, Robinson breathes new life into snapshots¬¬¬ of the recent past. A couple celebrating New Year’s Eve, society women dressed in furs, and swing dancers are all caught in brief impressions. These paintings give transitory glimpses of life back then, of an age that already feels bygone. Viewers are transformed as visitors, tourists, invited to engage with fleeting moments that we recognize and, perhaps, even long for.
Equally important is how the painter convinces us of the truth of this experience. The subject matter seems familiar, as amateur photography from an extremely interesting family album, but upon close inspection each painted image is made of entirely abstract shapes of shades of light and dark. What seems to be a woman’s face from afar is revealed to be abstraction upon closer view. Realism dissolves into shape and value and the artist, as the blue-collar worker of culture and the translator of the painted experience, takes a well-deserved bow.

Jeff Robinson lives and works in Kansas City, Missouri. His work is in the corporate collections of The New York Times, Nike Corporation, Time Warner, American General Insurance, St. Regis Hotels, American Century Investments, and the Albrecht Kemper Museum.

These exhibitions will be open February 5th – March 20, 2021
Gallery Hours: Tuesday – Saturday 11-5 p.m.
For past exhibitions, please visit our archive.


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