Author: Davin Watne

 

David Rygiol & James Walker

November 1-17, 2018

Opening Reception: Thursday, November 1, 2018 7-8:30 pm

Free Parking in the Cherry St. Garage, levels 5 & 6 

TypeTalk with James Walker, November 1, 6-6:30 pm at UMKC Miller-Nichols Library, rm 325

The University of Missouri-Kansas City and the Kansas City Art Institute are excited to present TypeHike, a collaborative, non-profit, design project that supports America’s National Park system, through the use of expressive typography and graphic design. Using the traditional format and bold imagery of poster design, TypeHike was born from the belief that designers are obligated to use their talent and ability to make the world a more beautiful place. Creators David Rygiol and James Walker expanded upon this belief to include, and thereby support, natural beauty, when they began their project in August 2016 in celebration of the National Park Service Centennial.

Currently, many naturally occurring national monuments and designated reserves are under scrutiny with the possibility of having their protections removed. TypeHike serves to remind us to get outside, explore, and appreciate the sublime beauty of our home planet. To support the threatened park system, Rygiol and Walker created four unique series of prints focusing on shorelines, recreation, endangered animals, and Mars. All profits are donated to protect and preserve wildlife environments and its inhabitants, and support scholarships for environmental research.

Federico Solmi

Thursday, August 23 – Thursday, October 26, 2018
Opening Reception: Thursday August 23, 2018, 5—7PM
Free Parking in the Cherry St. garage, levels 5 & 6

The UMKC Gallery of Art is pleased to be a participant in the Open Spaces Arts Experience 2018. We will be exhibiting the work of internationally recognized artist Federico Solmi with wall-to-wall, ceiling to floor projected animations that confound the viewer with color, sound, texture and light.

The Great Farce is the most recent chapter in New York based Italian artist Federico Solmi’s unfolding investigation into the unspoken archetypal myths that provide the underpinning of nativist ideologies. Unlike most video artists, who depend on a lens-based process to create their work, Solmi repurposes the virtual architecture of video games to conjure a phantasmagoric world of whirling space, jerking movement and oscillating facades that strive to overwhelm the viewer’s visual field. Mining the contradictions and inaccuracies of historical narratives that he views as having lured their audience into a chaotic era of misinformation, Solmi takes particular aim at the society of the spectacle, whose bottomless thirst for glittering pageants of mind-numbing banality is understood by the artist to be purposefully depriving the populace of their right to the truth, thereby undermining their capacity to engage in critical reflection of the world around them.

Alongside “The Great Farce” video installation is a vitrine of artist books that hint at Solmi’s elaborate animation process. 3-D models of characters and environments are built and texture mapped with scans of hand-painted imagery. A virtual world is created within a game engine, where each scene is staged as a movie set. The characters act as puppets, animated through motion capture and computer scripts rather than strings. Solmi has compiled ten artist books that include paintings of historic myths alongside the paintings originally scanned to texture eight of his most iconic characters. By turning the pages, visitors are exposed to the tactility of traditional media that Solmi introduces to new technologies.