Open Plan
HAW/Contemporary 
Kansas City, MO

The works in Open Plan engage dialogues that shift abstract form away from its pure distillation and focus on its relationships to constructed environments, history of place, spatial responses, and the dynamics of seeing.  Occupying the entirety of the three interconnected ground floor galleries of HAW Contemporary’s Stockyards space, this exhibition presents paintings, photographic collages, and sculptures that investigate the complex dualities of images and objects, representation and abstraction, perception and understanding, fact and fiction, building and rebuilding.

Modernist architects broke away from traditional designs and construction methods, favoring approaches offering a continuity and liberation of physical space.  Identified by Le Corbusier as one of his ‘Five Points of Architecture’, an open plan references interior spaces free of sub-dividing walls.  His principles shifted the aesthetic vernacular and usability of architecture to include clear perspectives on site-specificity.  Entering each gallery, viewers encounter works that are distinct in their content and are informing and sampling one another.  The layout of the exhibition is both structurally unified and fractally unfolding, underlining the idea that all manners of art-making are an act of construction.







         

                   



       

                   



photographs by E.G. Schempf