Johnson County Community College
Press Release

College Information and Publications
913-469-8500
Julie Haas, Director, ext. 3120
Peggy Graham, Writer, ext. 3425
Tyler Cundith, Sports Information Director, ext. 3122

10/31/05
Story by Whitney Gameson

JCCC Gallery of Art Opens New Exhibition

OVERLAND PARK, Kan. – The Gallery of Art at Johnson County Community College opens a new exhibition Charlotte Street Foundation • 2005 featuring works by Kansas City-based artists Callyann Casteel, Miles Neidinger, Max Key, Craig Subler and Sean Ward opening Nov. 6 through Dec. 20. The opening reception is scheduled from 3 to 5 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 6, with a lecture by the artists at 3:30 p.m. in room 211 of the Carlsen Center. Both reception and lecture are free to the public.

JCCC Gallery of Art hours are Monday, Thursday, and Friday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Tuesday and Wednesday from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., and Saturday and Sunday from 1 to 5 p.m. For more information, call 913-469-8500, ext. 3789.

Established in 1997 to recognize outstanding achievement by Kansas City artists, the Charlotte Street Foundation has distributed grants to 51 local artists. These unrestricted awards enable artists to focus on creating new work, often providing means for experimentation. The awards and consequent exhibition offer artists significant exposure, along with the opportunity for attracting critical feedback. The Charlotte Street Foundation also heightens the city’s viability as a place for professional artists to live and work. As the Foundation celebrates its ninth anniversary, Kansas City commands national attention for the rich and diverse artwork created here and now. This is the second Charlotte Street Foundation exhibition presented by the JCCC Gallery of Art.

Callyann Casteel creates delicate drawings in mixed media but is best known for her towering, floppy creature costumes designed and worn for public performances. Casteel, who first gained notoriety for her giant hamburgers and calculators that danced for amused onlookers at gallery openings and in parks, now seems to be focusing her skills on creating more abstract works. Her latest creations are a celebration of excessive patterning – bulky chains that epitomize “bling” (a term that refers to status-symbol jewelry), spike-like horns and other decorative elements in a hodgepodge of colors and fabrics.

Callyann Casteel

Max Key creates wall-size paintings of feral, fleshy plant-like formations that sprout out of old-fashioned wallpaper patterns and architectural elements, often adorned with glowing globes or twinkling cityscape-like lights. Gaudy metallic accents and sexual imagery, such as the breast-shaped scaling and entwined pink and blue limbs of What Happens in Heaven Stays in Heaven, create a seedy, overdone Vegas glitz that is both hypnotic and disturbing.

Max Key

Miles Neidinger shares Sean Ward’s skill for making the mundane arresting. Neidinger considers the way we categorize and assign meaning to the daily stuff that drifts in and out of our lives, and then he incorporates intelligent appropriations of objects and their industrial designs into graceful, otherworldly installations. In his past works, his nimble precision turned coat hangers from Wal-Mart into smooth, spiraling tunnels that seductively curved around walls. Now he takes another generic item – aluminum foil – and uses it as a sculptural material that draws remarkable shapes and forms into architectural space, breaking open the complacency of an interior with a reality-bending mindscape.

Miles Neidinger

With his latest series of small drawings and paintings, Craig Subler turns his attention to the interior landscape of the museum, a realm where the blatant commercialism of gift shops encroaches on the highbrow beauty of fine art, and visitors are depicted as everything from diffident bystanders to dutiful onlookers. Subliminal art historical references are thrown together with pointedly generic-looking sculptures and amorphous cartoon creatures, creating a garage-sale assemblage that lacks any kind of cultural hierarchy or narrative.

Craig Subler

Sean Ward’s interest in the grotesque is more of a love of its limitless creative potential than a testosterone-fueled fascination. “I like what horror allows the figure to do ... you can rip the arm off and put it somewhere completely different, disfigure the body,” he explained. For example, in Portraits 3 & 4 Ward excerpts a tiny picture from the package of a Halloween mask purchased at K-mart and glorifies it on a huge canvas with roaring detail. The result is a magnificent rock-star zombie reminiscent of the character Sloth from the 1980s movie Goonies.

Sean Ward