Shape Shifters was a curatorial installation by the nomadic, amorphous gallery project Lodger Arts - run by Charlotte Street fellow Craig Deppen Auge.
Utilizing the outdated office renovation from decades ago that was in place when Troost Gardens aquired the building, Deppen Auge showcased the work of 3 up-and-coming Kansas City artists, which spaned a warren of small interconnected rooms.
From Deppen Auge:
Lodger's very first in-person exhibit, Shape Shifters, brings together the abstract works of Kansas City artists Cesar Lopez, Kylie McConnell and Dylan Sanchez. In line with the easygoing nature of Lodger, works were staged in an "as-is" former botanica, now the site of a developing community art gallery, Troost Gardens, in South KC. All three of these artists negotiate compositional control and self-imposed structure with raw, emotional instinct and painterly abandon.
Cesar Lopez isolates, extracts and redefines segments from globular models. These then exist as both autonomous painted forms, and as pieces like that of a puzzle, suggesting a larger, unified whole. Active tangles of black and white brush strokes confront hard boundaries. Kylie McConnell's mixed media works are concerned with themes of repetition, collage-as-process, and self-recycling studio systems. The color palette is often influenced by 90's pop culture, with the base materials and imagery including ordinary business ephemera. Dylan Sanchez creates paintings, drawings and collage by largely improvisational methods, with outcomes similar to free-associative jazz tunes. Within these drawings is an uninhibited, tender application of color. Within each small-scale collage, swift excisions are repositioned to produce spacial rifts.
Lopez, McConnell and Sanchez all pay homage in some way to mid-century abstract expressionism and/ or a general familiar, vintage "mod" aesthetic. All are interested in utilizing commonplace, industrial, or readily available materials. The works feel immediate, self-aware, vigorous, and vibrationally harmonious with the transitional nature of the site. Shapes and gestures shift and converse with each other casually and comfortably.