Altered States of Agoraphobia: Voyage of Small Discoveries: Simon Kossoff at {:m Momentum Gallery. An exhibition review.

Sunday, November 1, 2009

Voyage of Small Discoveries: Simon Kossoff at {:m Momentum Gallery. An exhibition review.

Lost Boy (II)

Bear, Lawrence, KS

Billboard, Wellsville, KS

Writer and artist Steve Brisendine wrote a review of my recent Running on Empty show for Re-View Magazine (Mid-America's Visual Arts Publication) as part of his excellent and energetic KC Art 365 column: http://ereview.org/category/all-articles/artkc365/

Simon Kossoff
Running on Empty

{:m Momentum Gallery
2014 Main Street
Kansas City, MO
816.560.1450

Hours: First Fridays, 6-9 p.m., Monday 11 a.m.-3 p.m. and by appointment.

"Not to sound the urgency alarm or anything, because Mondays exact a toll as it is, but if you don't get to the {:m Momentum Gallery today, you'll miss the second half of Simon Kossoff's Running on Empty and miss a chance to see this city, this region, this country through the eyes and lens of a recent arrival.

Kossoff, a native of England who now lives in Overland Park, came to the U.S. just in time to see history in the making. Not long after he got here, he started exploring the country.

Instead of presenting the landmarks of America, the things in which we take national pride, Kossoff captured images of kitsch (as in Hobby Lobby, Kansas, today's featured piece). He turned his lens toward our culture of disposability and the chase for easy money. He recorded all of it with an observer's dispassionate eye and an artist's gift for composition that elevates his subject matter above the commonplace.

This is not a show of "pretty pictures". Nor is it an exhibition of in-your-face images chosen for shock value. If there's confrontation in Kossoff's work, it's because he shows us as we are (which is not always how we want to see ourselves). And if there is beauty, and there is, it is not necessarily in the things Kossoff photographs, but in the lines and colors and light that define, outline and shape those things.

These are postcards not from an extended vacation, but from an ongoing quest. And if you get to the gallery before three this afternoon, you can go along for the ride.

By Steve Brisendine August 31, 2009

A link to the published review can be found here. Many thanks Steve. :

http://ereview.org/2009/08/31/voyage-of-small-discoveries-simon-kossoff-at-m-momentum-gallery/

A slideshow of the Running on Empty series can be seen here:

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Welcome

About the photographs: These images are a search for a personal orientation between the dream or idea of a place and my actual experience of it in reality. They can be described as a collection of psychic coordinate points which I have plotted between the imagined America I brought with me from England and the real America I found on my arrival in 2008. These images are half truth and half fiction. They are a psychogeography, filled with personal symbolism and tangled with influences so old they were already part of me long before this journey ever began.

A note about the title:  The compulsion to travel, to move from one place to another, has been with me my whole life. Whether it be local, national or international, I have always found myself either in motion or, if not, I have been dreaming about it. Paradoxically, it has been in the periods of dreaming that Agoraphobia, (which Google defines as “Extreme or irrational fear of entering open or crowded places, of leaving one's own home, or of being in places from which escape is difficult”) has gripped me and, at times, crippled me. These photographs are my continued (once secret) revolt against it in the United States of America today, despite recent quarantines.