Charlotte Street Foundation’s Urban Culture Project presents
OVER AGAIN: ALISON BRADY AND SARAH KNOBEL,
OPENING FRIDAY, MARCH 18, 6-9PM.
Urban Culture Project Space | 21 E. 12th Street, Kansas City MO, 64105
A two person show by Alison Brady (New York) and Sarah Knobel (Washington, DC) featuring
a collaborative video installation and individual photographs by each artist that employ absurdity, wry humor, and surrealism as they explore issues of isolation, loneliness and anxiety
OVER AGAIN: ALISON BRADY AND SARAH KNOBEL
Opening reception: Friday, March 18, 6-9pm (artist remarks at 6:30pm)
Exhibition runs March 18-May 7, 2011
Gallery hours: 12-5pm Wed, Fri & Sat; 11-6pm Thurs.
PLUS Artist Talk (open to the public): Wednesday, March 16, 9:30am
University of Missouri-Kansas City, Fine Arts Building, Room 206A
Sponsored by the UMKC Art and Art History Department
Over Again presents the work of New York-based Alison Brady and Washington DC- based Sarah Knobel, two emerging artists quickly building international reputations for photo- and video- based works that wrestle with cultural expectations, ideas of normality, and feelings of anxiety and isolation related to their experiences as women transitioning from carefree to more careful adulthood in the 21st century.
The centerpiece of the exhibition is a new, collaborative video installation, Over Again, which combines aspects of absurdity and wry humor with a low-tech sensibility to create a surreal, fraught space in which the anxious uncertainty of the everyday is explored. Portraying the activities and imaginings of a housewife within her domestic environment, this work examines issues surrounding aging, work, marriage and motherhood in a manner both humorous and disturbing, mundane and cathartic. Visit www.overagain.info for more about Over Again, including a video teaser.
Also featured at Project Space will be a selection of large-format color photographs by each artist. Alison Brady’s photographs “deal rather explicitly and hilariously with the female predicament,” as critic Roberta Smith wrote in The New York Times about Brady’s 2008 solo show, “Sweet Affliction” at Massimo Audiello gallery in Chelsea. Her most recent photographs draw on classical portraiture formats while also invoking the work of other women photographers, from Diane Arbus to Cindy Sherman. Carefully staged and crafted, these portraits of women evince physical and psychic states in which control and excess, the beautiful and grotesque, and the erotic and the ridiculous coexist.
In her digital prints, Sarah Knobel constructs fantastic tableau populated by elements drawn from pop culture. As she describes it, this assemblage of referents “creates a stage that allows me to decipher individuality and the influence of the collective experience.” More specifically, these images, in which rainbows, clouds, cats, birds, modernist furniture, and self-portraits converge within carefully constructed interior environments suggest the disjunction between expectations and reality, youth and adulthood, constraint and freedom, and private and public selves.
Alison Brady earned her MFA in Photography Video and Related Media from The School of Visual Arts (NYC). Her work has been featured in publications such as New York Arts Magazine, Time Out NY and The New York Times; and has been made a part of Sir Elton John’s personal art collection. Along with showing in solo exhibitions with Massimo Audiello, in NYC, she has participated in group exhibitions throughout the U.S. and internationally, including the Prague Biennale, Czech Republic; Fleetwing Gallery/Brooklyn Artillery, Brooklyn, NY; Detroit Museum of New Art, Detroit, MI; Kiosky Gallery, Christchurch, New Zealand; Space 301, Mobil, AL; Woom Gallery, Birmingham, England; and Kopeikin Gallery, LA, CA. Visit www.alisonbrady.com for more.
Sarah Knobel is based in Washington, D.C., and has shown work internationally, including in SLICK 2009 Contemporary Art Fair in Paris, France and in the exhibition Gimme More at Elaine Levy Project, Brussels, Belgium, as well as in Playful Things at University of Central Missouri, Warrensburg, MO. Her work has been presented in solo exhibits at venues including, Elaine Levy Project, Brussels; RagTag Cinema, Columbia, MO; Guillardia Gallery, San Marcos, TX; Hotcakes Gallery, Milwaukee, WI; Magic Lantern Film, Providence, RI; and Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati, OH. She has also participated in art festivals including Videonale 10, Kunst Museum, Bonn, Germany; 700 IS Film and Video Festival, Egilsstadir, Iceland; and 312 Online: Festival of Contemporary Video and Film, Sir Wilfred Grenfell College Art Gallery, Corner Brook, Newfoundland, Canada. Visit http://sarahknobel.com for more.
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Charlotte Street Foundation is dedicated to making Kansas City a place where artists and art thrive. Through its Urban Culture Project initiative, Charlotte Street supports artists of all disciplines and contributes to city’s vitality by transforming previously vacant spaces into dynamic venues for multi-disciplinary contemporary arts programming. For more information, visit www.charlottestreet.org.
