The Kansas City Jewish Museum is pleased to present Larry Thomas: Ploys & Decoys, a solo exhibition of new large-scale mixed media paintings and portfolio prints by Kansas-based artist Larry Thomas. This exhibition opens Sunday, January 17, 2010, at the Epsten Gallery at Village Shalom with a public reception from 2-4 p.m. and an informal conversation with the artist at 3 p.m. in the Village Shalom Social Hall. Larry Thomas: Ploys & Decoys remains on view through Sunday, February 28, 2010.

Larry Thomas: Ploys & Decoys

Kansas-based artist and long-time Johnson County Community College Professor and Art Department Chair Larry Thomas presents Ploys & Decoys, a new solo exhibition of large-scale mixed media paintings, and portfolio prints. Within this new body of work, Thomas combines digital and actual collage with traditional painting techniques and state-of-the-art printing methods to address the concept of camouflage as a means of both concealing and revealing thoughts, ideas, and emotions.

Neither abstract nor entirely representational, Thomas’ images exist in an in-between realm, where close inspection reveals forms that flutter and swirl into recognition. Thomas uses the visual language of camouflage to remind us of its usefulness as an “immune system” in the management of everyday life among the natural world, within war’s industrial complex, throughout our society’s popular culture, and as we individually negotiate the social situations of daily life.