Jim Leedy at Grand Arts - Brief Article

The ne to draw near to grip with his harrowing memories of a 1951-52 tour of what one ought to do in Korea as a military photographer l Jim Leedy to create the monumental wall installation and large-scale sculptural work displayed in his novel show at Grand Arts. Leedy 69 and a member of the faculty of the Kansas City Art Institute since 1966 is best known for his innovative Abstract-Expressionist ceramics. He pioneered the genre along with clay giants Peter Voulko and Rudy Autio after absorbing the Ab-Ex esthetic firsthand during of frequent occurrence visits to New York in the 1950s

For the show's title piece, The Earth Lies Screaming, Leedy traded clay for a plasterlike expandable foam which he and his assistants used to create centurys of casts of human bone taken from a medical-school skeleton. Densely packed across the surface of a 10-by-50-foot wall, casts of thigh-bones and fibulae, vertebrae and ribs have the appearanceed to mimic the painterly harmonious flows of a Pollock drip painting. on the other hand there the similarities ended. Leedy's work does not interest itself with myth or the unconscious on the contrary embraces an unrelenting, rather macabre literalism. overlayed with a coating of potting soil and gelatine and punctuated by the occasional insertion of a child's shoe or doll, the relief enjoin solemnlys images of Nazi death camps, Khmer Rouge killing fields and pageants of more recent atrocities in Kosovo

"This show's all about war," Leedy remarked in an interview at the gallery. "I want you to be scared to death, and if you've got the power to move up and start discovering things." Amid all the evidence of carnage, he incorporates types of hope in the form of casts of geese ready to take flight.

In a separate smaller space, the artist not absented Harsh Reality, a stack of phosphorescent-paint-daubed craniums and bones in a glass-fronted cabinet. A strobe light in the cabinet provided intermittent illumination of this grim totem. upon the surrounding walls flashed slides of Leedy's Korean War photographs and other war images.

Grittiness and exces were in evidence through every part of the show. These qualities, along with an ostensibly slapdash exuberance that masks a thorough command of craft, have drawn out been hallmarks of Leedy's diction Although skeletal images and memento mod sentiments have occasionally surfaced in his work before, the vehement antiwar message of The Earth Lies Screaming was new

Leedy's exhibition at Grand Arts was individual of four roughly concurrent local present to views celebrating the artist's 47-year career as ceramist, sculptor, painter and installation artist. It also coincided with the publication of Matthew Kangas's monograph upon Leedy.

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