The Kansas City Jewish Museum of Contemporary Art is pleased to present Overland at the Epsten Gallery at Village Shalom. This exhibition features artists who maintain an active outdoor studio practice in the creation of their work, presenting new and recent works by Marci Aylward, John Davis Carroll, Lisa Grossman, Mary Ann Strandell and Jane Voorhees.

The opening reception for Overland is Sunday, November 6, 2011 from 2-4 p.m. in the Epsten Gallery with artists remarks at 3 p.m. Overland will remain on view through Sunday, January 8, 2012.
(All events are free and open to the public.)

Overland
Marci Aylward • John Davis Carroll • Lisa Grossman • Mary Ann Strandell • Jane Voorhees

As a subject, the landscape is as old as art itself yet it still manages to capture our collective imagination. There is something primordial in one’s response to the depiction of land and sky – swaths of blue and green divided by the plumb-line persistence of the horizon. Our eyes are unable to escape this relationship save for a gaze up at the stars or a glance down at our feet. As perpetual dwellers of the space between land and sky we cannot help but wonder what lies beyond our perpetual foreground existence. The next great vista or open expanse must lie somewhere just beyond that last grove of trees … or row of buildings.

In Overland, artists Marci Aylward, John Davis Carroll, Lisa Grossman, Mary Ann Strandell and Jane Voorhees each explore the relationship between land and sky, foreground and vista, flat and infinite, and life at human scale set against nature’s epic backdrop. Moving between studio environments both inside and outdoors, each artist explores this subject relative to different issues of remoteness, memory, humanity’s impact upon the environment, relationships between the organic and inorganic, and nature’s own evolutionary ebb and flow.