FRAGMENTS by James Woodfill

First Friday, June 4, 2010, from 6 - 9 pm.Exhibition continues through Friday, June 25, 2010.Review Studios Exhibition Space, 1708 Campbell St, Kansas City, Mo., 816. 994.7134.Review Studios Exhibition Space hours:

• Tues-Fri 10 am - 4 pm
• Sat 12 pm - 4 pm

FRAGMENTS is a new installation of studio work from James Woodfill, conceived and built over the last few years. It is a reconstruction of sorts – a continuation of an experiment with constructed space that began in the studio, and recently culminated in the installation STATIONS, at Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, in Omaha, Nebraska.The installation will include multimedia elements ranging from video, sound and light to constructions of wood, plastic, steel and found objects.“My most recent work considers issues of fragmented reference – incomplete scenarios that organically connect with adjacent mental and physical structures. I want to diversify the elements that make up the installations that I create, pushing the idea of “singularity” that was present in my earlier work to the point of dissolve, with each instant of understanding leading to a new unique moment.Within each discrete structure, drifting intentions provide numerous starts and stops, with the boundaries loose so that a continual rhythm of shifts occurs, both perceptually and in memory. The boundaries then blur from piece to piece, forming constantly changing and drifting sets of reference and experience.I have many starting points in my engagement with this work. I am often working with formal considerations, bringing reference to design, architecture and function into play with the idea of an ad-hoc development of the built environment, and utilizing these issues as compositional equivalents to color, form and space.My intentions are to build an experience that prods a lateral set of memories and relationships, from personal and local to universal and global, providing a fluid set of referential encounters that mirror my experience of moving through my environmentHesse McGraw, curator for the exhibition at Bemis, wrote:“These works extend from Woodfill's history of working in galleries and public sites and build upon an ongoing dialogue about reference points such as physical perception, architectural space, urbanism's fuzzy edges, materiality and abstraction. . . . Beyond melding high and low cultures, this (work) merges the formal concerns of pure, systemic painting with the ad hoc, functional beauty of cobbled structures.”The work for FRAGMENTS has an extended history, starting in response to the space of the studio, and the exhibition space at Review. Extending from the idea of a traveling installation, the parts and pieces were re-formed and altered in dialog with the unique space at Bemis, and as it returns it brings this history back into a conversation with Studios.Kansas City based artist James Woodfill's exhibitions and public art works have received significant national recognition for their effects on the perception of space. Woodfill's work has been reviewed in such publications as Art In America, Art Papers, New Art Examiner, I.D. Magazine and Sculpture magazine. His public work has been widely recognized with numerous awards, including awards from the American Institute of Architects. Woodfill's efforts have extended into education, curatorial projects, writings and numerous urban planning projects and studies. He received a Charlotte Street Foundation award in Kansas City. In 2000 he served as visiting assistant professor in experimental mixed media at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. Woodfill graduated from the Kansas City Art Institute in 1980 and he has taught there since 1998. He has been a resident of REVIEW STUDIOS since 2006.http://jameswoodfill.com