Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art

You are one step closer to learning the truth

February 8 – June 15, 2008

Deb Sokolow, preliminary artist’s rendering of
You are one step closer to learning the truth (detail), 2007;
graphite, ink on paper; Courtesy of the artist

Deb Sokolow’s elaborate diagrammatic drawings read like graphic novels. Often constructed with pen, pencil, watercolor, and correction fluid on paper, each drawing’s story features diagrams, floor plans, texts, and illustrations that chart an anonymous, paranoid narrator’s obsessive explorations of the circumstances and clandestine connections among various characters and places. For the Kemper Museum, Sokolow works directly on the gallery walls to construct a new storyline based on an amateur detective’s attempts to unravel a mystery involving barbecue sauce, food critics, condiment espionage, and Kansas City’s SubTropolis. Written in the second-person and following the narrative structure of a Choose Your Own Adventure—a popular series of children’s books—viewers assume the role of the central character and determine the fate of the inquisitive detective.

Common Grounds

March 11–July 18, 2008

Tina Barney, The Bridesmaids in Pink, 1995;
chromogenic color print, 48 x 70 inches;
Museum Purchase, Barbara Uhlmann Memorial Fund, 2001.21

Considering images of the familiar and the everyday explored in the documentary-style photographs of Stephen Shore, Common Grounds brings together works from the Kemper Museum’s permanent collection that respond to the people, places, and things that compose the American vernacular. Artists Tina Barney, Jim Dine, Neeta Madahar, Fairfield Porter, and Wayne Thiebaud, among others, transform the ordinary into the extraordinary through careful observation and personalized depictions of America’s common grounds.

Julia Oschatz: Where Else

April 4 – July 6

Julia Oschatz, untitled (122-07), 2007;
oil, acrylic, spray paint on canvas, 21 5/8 x 29 1/8 inches;
Courtesy of the artist and Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects , New York

Julia Oschatz’s room-size installations, comprising paintings, drawings, and videos housed in cardboard constructions, chart the eternal odyssey of a fictitious protagonist this German artist’s ongoing narrative. Part animal and part human, this wayward being stars in short, looping videos that blend performance, animation, and painted imagery, and in muted, enigmatic landscape paintings. Whether dancing to German pop music or meandering through an unearthly terrain, Oschatz’s benign, and at times comical, character embodies the existential quest for meaning and transcendence.

RubberMade: Sculpture by Chakaia Booker

June 6 – August 17

Chakaia Booker, Sugar in my Bowl, 2003;
rubber tire and steel, 95 x 110 x 57 3/4 inches;
Courtesy of the artist and Marlborough Gallery, New York

Since the early 1990s, Chakaia Booker has worked almost exclusively with recycled tires. Through a physically demanding process of twisting, slicing, and weaving found rubber tires (primarily from bikes, cars, and farm equipment), she forms dynamic, whimsical sculptures that fuse ecological concerns with questions about racial and economic differences, globalization, and existing sociopolitical power structures. Featuring more than twenty sculptures, this exhibition surveys the past seven years of production by one of today’s leading African-American artists.