WFA artist Jim Woodfill is in residence at the Crossroads hotel studio during the exhibition to produce new stop-motion films of the sculptures. The exhibit will open Friday, June 7th and be on view through August 31st, 2019.
For a place in constant motion, Kansas City artist James Woodfill created this series of works that imply motion, and encourage us to reconsider our surroundings. Somewhere between painting, sculpture, functional design, and animated abstraction, these works shift our experience of this place into one of anticipation and discovery.
A hotel exists uniquely between private and public, home and destination, local and transient. Into this environment, Woodfill’s room-sized exhibition is crafted from ordinary materials, yet encourages an extraordinary experience of place, by tuning our perception and heightening our awareness of our own movement through this space.
About his previous work Stations, Woodflll said, I’m trying to make an artwork “that hovers between a Constructivist painting and a fireworks stand.” Tuning Field gets closer to flickering between a Storage Wars blind reveal and a stop-motion film. It is an experience that bridges our patience for subtle shifts in perception, with the movement of things, alongside our own exploration of this building and the city that surrounds us.
This work directly gauges the distance between the anxiety of the unknown, and the joys of surprise. As you look at, and more importantly move around, these things, you might ask — What is its use? How do I move? What kind of place is this?
A hotel is a place that can change our perceptions of a city. An artwork can change the city.
– Hesse McGraw, partner and curator, el dorado inc
About the Artist
James Woodfill is a 1980 graduate of the Kansas City Art Institute and has lived and worked in Kansas City since.
As an interdisciplinary artist, his work is focused on direct experience through the composition of objects, occurrences and site. His artworks regularly blur boundaries in their execution, often merging with functional design. His installations bridge the fields of sculpture, painting and public art, and his work in the public realm has extended into education and curatorial projects, writings and numerous urban planning projects and studies.
Woodfill’s work has been widely recognized, including reviews in Art In America, Art Papers, Hyperallergic, I.D. Magazine, and Sculpture Magazine; and awards from the American Institute of Architects, and the Americans for the Arts/Public Art Network annual “Year in Review.” Woodfill currently holds the position of Professor in the Painting Department of the Kansas City Art Institute.
