The Kansas City Jewish Museum is pleased to present, Mark Cowardin: From the Ground Up, a solo exhibition featuring new large-scale sculpture by Kansas-based artist Mark Cowardin.

This exhibition opens Sunday, November 8, 2009, at the Epsten Gallery at Village Shalom with a public reception from 2-4 p.m. and an informal conversation with the artist in the gallery at 3 p.m. Mark Cowardin: From the Ground Up will remain on view through Sunday, January 3, 2010.

Mark Cowardin: From the Ground Up

Within the space of home exists an environment where simple, everyday objects and architecture shape our social and individual identities via memory, functionality, nostalgia and symbolic ritual. Our collective understanding of this place is periodically in question, however, as generations simultaneously renegotiate it¹s meaning through migration, displacement, different cultural points of reference, and ideas of usefulness.

Artist Mark Cowardin brings this environment into focus with a new body of work that defines the home as a specifically un-built environment. Neither quite here nor there, the conceptual spaces Cowardin creates with his sculptures and installations are mental thresholds for us to enter and consider various states of potential.

Cowardin approaches his subjects through the industrial complex of the building industry, namely construction materials such as actual two-by-fours and simulated cinder blocks, ductwork, and electrical switches. Using these and other forms as a type of workman¹s visual language, Cowardin manages to subvert them into ironic and conflicting metaphors for a sense of loss over the deconstruction of our historic surroundings and, simultaneously, to question the usefulness of nostalgia when balancing the scales of mass consumption and future sustainability.