ARCHIE SCOTT GOBBER
Talentless, 2008
gouache on vintage board 8 5/8 X 11 in.
The Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art at Johnson County Community College presents WORD -a group exhibition featuring Archie Scott Gobber, Christopher Leitch, Jim Sajovic. The exhibition opens tonight, Friday, September 11, 2009, from 6-9pm, with artist talks at 7pm.
The use of text is integral to the current work of Kansas City-based artists Archie Scott Gobber, Christopher Leitch and Jim Sajovic. WORD juxtaposes these three artists, highlighting their varying conceptual and visual approaches to the use of written language.
In the digital age, with the complexity of multi-culturism in a global society, what is the future of the visual/verbal in our present-day Tower of Babel? The three Kansas City artists in WORD – Archie Scott Gobber, Christopher Leitch and Jim Sajovic — offer very different and idiosyncratic answers, as WORD demonstrates. But they also share some mportant commonalities. Like the best word/art being created today, their work consciously
acknowledges aspects of art historical precedents, while exemplifying new kinds of ord/artforms that are deeply personal, subtly disturbing and truly unexpected.
Gobber, Leitch and Sajovic have all rejected (hands down) the didacticism and anti-aesthetic stance of a previous generation of conceptualists. Each has insisted that aesthetics have a powerful and unforgettable presence in their work, even as the text holds center court. In their art, the overtly political and remorseless verbal language of the last several decades has given way to paintings and works on paper in which ambiguity and open-endedness rule, and where the viewer is encouraged to not just look but participate. If that proves somewhat destabilizing, so much the better. The “protocols of print” in our new network culture are disintegrating and reassembling in a manner yet tobe fully determined, a fact that this exhibit poetically underscores. -essay by Bruce Hartman, executive director, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art.
The Nerman Museum is open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday; 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Friday; and noon to 5 p.m. Sunday.
For more information about the exhibition, call 913-469-3000 or visit www.nermanmuseum.org (admission and parking are free). [MAP]
Also, visit Marty Walker Gallery for additional works by Archie Scott Gobber.
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