Studios Inc is pleased to present Lilly McElroy’s solo exhibition titled, “I Will Destroy You.” on view September 8th through October 21st, 2023.

An opening reception will be hosted on Friday, September 8th from 5-8 pm.

Lilly McElroy will host an artist talk on Saturday, September 9th from 12-1 pm.

From the artist:

“You are standing in a landscape. Maybe it is a pasture, or maybe it is the lakeshore on a summer evening, or maybe it is the top of a mountain, the wilderness past the end of the trail, but whatever this place is, in this moment, it feels safe. It feels stable. Then it doesn’t. All at once, there is dread and melancholy. You are here, waiting for an inevitable end. It is coming, you are grieving, but at least this place is pretty.

I will destroy you.

It’s natural to make photographs while you wait for the inevitable. Photography captures light and freezes time. It is an attempt to preserve the fleeting. For this exhibition photographs of the setting sun were made by McElroy using a 4 x 5 film camera. She then irrevocably altered the negatives, using her fingernail to scratch away the image of the sun. This action is small yet devastating; the anxious picking at a scab that leaves you with a lifelong scar. The sun, the very thing whose light makes the photograph possible, has been gouged out of the negative, the printed picture rendering this absence not as erasure revealing blank paper, but as the ominous birth of an angry black void. McElroy’s hand is directly linked to this destruction as the sun becomes a meteor, dark and crackling in the sky, a malevolent yellow nimbus dancing around it as it hurtles toward the surface of the earth, toward you.

In her monolithic works the sun is a dark orb that hovers over a bucolic field. It no longer emits energy or light; it only absorbs and you are standing in front of it. The innate silence of the photograph now presses down on the landscape. The rustling of the grass in the wind, the susurration of the insects in the field are cut off, and you can only hear the sounds of your own breath. McElroy made these images in the darkroom, laying negatives directly on top of light sensitive paper. With the press of a button, light flashed through the negative and struck the paper, chemically altering its structure. This transformation signals a shift, an irrevocable change, a violence that has been enacted and can’t be taken back.”

I Will Destroy You. will be on view thru October 21st. 

Exhibition hours: Wednesday through Friday from 10-4pm and Saturday from 12-4pm and by appointment 

Location: 1708 Campbell Street, Kansas City, MO, 64108

Townsend’s time-based drawing practice fuses mark-making, duration, and temporality to render monuments to moments as they pass. Big ideas and questions about time, presence, duration, obsession, and mark-making drive the work; however, simple details, relationships, and limitations construct the systems that animate the drawing act. His meditative works range from intimately scaled, delicate drawings that aggregate hours on paper to large-scale, public pieces that accumulate days of marking at the scale of architecture. 

Townsend’s large-scale works are composed, rendered, and exhibited on-site, directly on urban surfaces, the facades of buildings, or the walls of museums, and galleries in cities across the US, Canada, Europe, and Australia. The drawings are decidedly low entropy arrangements that do not feel like a random collection of lines. Each mark is a tic of the clock, a thought, a decision, and action made in a moment of the perceptual present, oriented to the other moments recorded before it. The accumulated marks evoke swarms, fields, clouds, flows, or topographies that index the passage of time and a laboring body’s movement through space.

At Home In Time will be on view in the Studios Inc Exhibition Hall.

TO BE DETERMINED is an exhibition curated by the Studios Inc interns who have direct access to the Studios Inc collection, as well as past and present residents of the program. The title of the exhibition allows the interns freedom to develop and execute their curatorial concept and vision; it is suggestive of the drive of the students who are committed to developing their professional practice and honing their skillset.

Interns are responsible for the curatorial concept and statement, curation of the studios.gallery space, installation, and promotion.

Studios Inc announces its TO BE DETERMINED 2021 exhibition. The group exhibition is curated by Studios Inc Interns Sydney Smith (KCAI) and Christian Bañez (MWSU).  This exhibition allows interns to fully curate an exhibition from conceptualization to execution.  

The show will be held in the studios.gallery space.  Smith and Bañez have chosen to feature resident artists past and present: Barry Anderson, Jill Downen, Andrea Flamini, Caitlin Horsmon, Misha Kligman, Kathy Liao, Marie McInerney and Miguel Rivera.  

Studios Inc will host an opening reception on Friday, April 2nd from 5-8pm.

TO BE DETERMINED will be on view thru May 28. Exhibition hours are currently Wednesday thru Friday from 10am-4pm and Saturday from 12-4pm.

Each year, current residents at Studios Inc contribute artwork to the Studios Inc’s collection. These donations allow Studios Inc to continue to promote and exhibit works from current and past artists. Additionally all sales/proceeds from the collection support the programs at Studios Inc, a 501c3 non-profit.

We encourage you to visit and see the diverse body of work contributed to the collection from 10 talented artists: Susan White, Benjamin Rosenthal, Kathy Liao, Emily Sall, Lori Raye Erickson, Kevin Townsend, Yoonmi Nam, Marie Bannerot McInerney, Judith G. Levy, and Peter Warren.