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FOR KANSAS AND MISSOURI I am an artist who lives in New York, and I was recently fortunate to have the Grand Arts gallery in Kansas City offer to help finance and produce an art exhibition for me. I decided to do a project that explored the shapes and topographies of the two states, Kansas and Missouri. I believe that everyone has a profound emotional involvement with such features of their own home territory, and I think that these feelings can be an interesting subject for artistic exploration. Instead of making just one single project to be seen by a limited number of Kansas City art viewers, I decided to expand the project into two parts. The first part, typical of what one expects from an artist, is to make some artworks for the gallery to put on exhibit and offer for sale. For this purpose I am creating a series of three-dimensional, topographical models of the two states, each cast from a mold in ceramic, and finished with bright colored glazes. The second part of the project uses the same molds again, but to create a different kind of object for an entirely different purpose. These additional topographical models are to be produced using a mixture of plaster and cement, and will be donated to small, regional historical society museums throughout Kansas and Missouri. This part of the project will be less about the objects themselves, and more about the "distribution" of the objects. One could think of the movement of these objects across the two states as a kind of "sculpture in motion." It can be very expensive to create a topographical model, but once a rubber mold is made it can be relatively economical to produce them in quantity. I am trying to "piggy-back" a practical, educational project on top of an art gallery project, and thus extend the benefits of Grand Arts gallery's efforts into areas beyond the Kansas City art community. All the models are being produced from molds taken from two original topographical models that were created using a computer-controlled routing machine. The machine was programmed with geographic information systems data supplied by the U. S. government. For those who are interested in learning a little more about the project as a whole, you are invited to visit the project website: ../../allanmcnyc/grandartsproject.html. The exhibition of the ceramic models will be on view from November 7 through December 20, 2003, at Grand Arts, 1819 Grand Boulevard, Kansas City, MO 64108. For those who would like more information, the gallery's phone number is 816.421.6887.
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