GRAND ARTS ANNOUNCES EXHIBITION BY ANTHONY BAAB
January 18 — March 30, 2013
Grand Arts is pleased to announce the opening of A Strenuous Nonbeing, an exhibition by artist Anthony Baab, on Friday, January 18th from 6 to 9pm.
A Strenuous Nonbeing is the culmination of Baab’s three-year collaboration with Grand Arts, and will include works of photography, décollage, drawing, and a live video feed from an undisclosed location in the city.
A Strenuous Nonbeing explores liminalities of time, place and scale, through carefully constructed images that suggest otherworldly zones of possibility. Monumental and industrial architectures, 3-D models, Photoshoppism, spirit photography and the curious phenomenon of modern-design cat furniture form a constellation of references in these new works, which began with a series of models the artist constructed in his studio.
Over the past ten years, Baab has explored themes of architecture, utility and representation through dazzling, meticulously constructed tape drawings of mostly intimate scale. For his Grand Arts project, Baab has continued this work while embarking upon the construction of an ephemeral, evolving gesamtkunstwerk, designed to appear only as a ghost in the photos and video of the exhibition.
Counterpoint to Baab’s folly architectures are his investigations of the city’s real underground, captured in photographs that surprise with their veracity and authenticity.
A Strenuous Nonbeing will be accompanied by a brochure with an essay by Stephen Lichty.
ABOUT ANTHONY BAAB:
Anthony Baab is a Kansas City-based artist. After receiving his BFA in painting from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2004, Baab went on to study interdisciplinary art at Cornell University, graduating in 2009 with his MFA. Baab's works have been shown frequently, including exhibitions at Tompkins Projects in Brooklyn, NY, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Overland Park, KS, The Dolphin in Kansas City, MO, and at the Cornell University College of Architecture and Art. In 2006 Baab was a recipient of the Charlotte Street Foundation Visual Arts Award. His work is in the collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS, and the Microsoft Art Collection in Richmond, WA. You can see Anthony Baab’s work at www.anthonybaab.com.
MEDIA CONTACT:
Seth Johnson
Communications & Public Programs Coordinator
PH: 816-421-6887
FAX: 816-421-1561
seth@grandarts.com
