Norman Akers' paintings and prints present layers upon layers of recurring images: maps, animals, landscape scenes and various objects such as a metal lunchbox, an extension cord and spinning tops. Viewers naturally try to construct an iconography that relates to the artist and his Osage Indian heritage. While this approach sheds valuable light on Akers' work, other rewards can be gained by leaving some aspects of his art open-ended.

In Okesa (2010), a rolling landscape filled with tree trunks appears behind a body of water in which a bull elk stands defiantly. A map of the Kansas-Oklahoma border area appears in the background, with boundaries of the nearby Osage Indian Reservation outlined. Some native place-names are visible, but other locales have been omitted purposely. Acorns appear in the upper left corner of the painting, while an oak sapling grows on an island in the lower right corner, possibly symbols of rebirth. According to Akers, okesa means "halfway" in the Osage language and relates to his sense that he "always feels halfway home." This may be a somewhat literal reference: the artist lived and worked in New Mexico for many years before he joined the faculty at the University of Kansas and moved closer to Osage ancestral lands, which he states include parts of Missouri, Kansas and Oklahoma. Taken as a whole, the painting seems to evoke a longing for homeland and a defense of ancestral land rights.

Border Crossing (2011) features images of earthworms, a metal lunchbox and a male yellow-shafted flicker. The worms can perhaps be read as occupants of the land that are free of any boundaries. The metal lunchbox refers to an Osage tradition of using them as a type of reliquary in burials. Flickers, a type of woodpecker, live year-round throughout much of the United States, but northern individuals often migrate. The Osage call the flicker "yellow hammer," and Akers relates to it both as a symbol of home and of migration.

The flicker in Border Crossing provides an important key to appreciating Akers' work. He indicates that the flicker plays a role in Osage mythology. It is tempting for viewers to inquire about the exact details of the Osage narrative. However, to delve deeper without a fuller awareness of Osage culture seems like prying or an invasion of privacy. Perhaps it is enough to know that the bird is significant to the artist and his desire to identify as Osage. By respecting Akers' artistic license, we potentially come closer to honoring his and his tribe's boundaries (literally and figuratively).

Deriving obvious delight from the creation of complex graphic patterns in unexpected color combinations, Elizabeth Allen-Cannon gives over large swaths of her canvases to glorious fields of pure ornamentation. She designs many of these patterns herself, drawing inspiration from an array of historical and contemporary sources. In so doing, she fully indulges in the pleasures of her process.

Yet Allen-Cannon has other ends in mind, deftly putting these vivid colors and patterns to work as flags, dresses and cloaks, wallpaper, rugs, and parquet floors, which, in turn, define specific spaces, places, individuals, clans. Her figures—stately older women in matching armchairs; muscular, pure-bred dogs racing or battling; statuesque horses (with patterned blinders) marching in line; a flock of young women in airy, matching dresses, headbands, and boots; an elegant group of African American teenagers—are striking and moodily evocative themselves, all the more so for the patterns in which they are swathed or by which they are surrounded.

Born in 1988 and raised in Kansas City, Elizabeth Allen-Cannon completed her BFA at Rhode Island School of Design in 2011 with a major in Illustration, Art History and Visual Culture. This "both, and" disposition characterizes not just her education and her paintings, but also her creative life as an artist in Kansas City. In addition to a near-daily studio practice focused on her painting, Allen-Cannon is an active member of Whoop Dee Doo, a raucous, artist-driven, community variety show spotlighting a vast array of talents.

Allen-Cannon describes her paintings as exploring "nostalgia and psychological solitude found in domestic social space," noting that "dislocation is commonplace in a fully mobile world, and requires that one be defined not by their immediate surroundings...but by previous experience." Indeed, when employed as clothing for her figures, the artist's patterns might be read as signifiers of each individual's singular identity—their unique DNA and personal history woven, almost map-like, into cloth. Simultaneously, the patterns connote group affiliation, common bloodline, shared history or status—variations on a theme, yes, but clearly of the same thread. At times, Allen-Cannon's graphically encoded textiles feel warmly protective, suggesting solidarity or allegiance to a common tribe or purpose. Other times they seem to encase their figures in a manner akin to strait jackets or uniforms: binding, repressing, locking each into place, time, or behavioral code.

Such dynamics are brought to fruition in Dog Fight, Allen-Cannon's recent painting of two canine protagonists entwined in a struggle for dominance at the center of an elegant room. If Allen-Cannon's human figures often evince stoic acceptance of their positions in life, her dogs aggressively play out the turmoil beneath the surface. Here, pattern defines the context by which they are constrained—a grand room that seems much too small to accommodate the both of them, and which thus functions as a boxing ring of sorts, from which only one winner can emerge.

Elizabeth Allen-Cannon's ultimate accomplishment is the manner in which she manages to give us a lot without giving us too much. There is a wonderful richness to these paintings, but they remain slightly elusive, giving us plenty of room to determine our place within them and with whom we will identify. As much as they are gorgeous objects, these paintings are triggers for our own stories and imaginations. Much of what we project onto and into them will be informed by where we come from and by whom we think we are.

- Kate Hackman

During a recent studio visit with Kansas City-based artist Robert Josiah Bingaman, a conversation about painting and place veered seamlessly (and almost without the writer's notice) to topics that included, but were not limited to, the Wichita suburb where he grew up, his two favorite authors – David Foster Wallace and W.G. Sebald – and their influence on his work, the pervasiveness of neo-eclectic architecture and the aesthetics of middle America, and the all-out building boom that delivered us to the front door of the mortgage crisis and economic bust of 2008.

Dominating the space of the conveniently modified single-car-garage-turned-studio, located in a leafy midtown neighborhood, is a large and electric painting of an overtly grand façade of someone's dream home. That someone happens to be Bingaman's parents and this is a portrait of the home they dreamed of building for all the years of his youth. The story doesn't end well as, along with so many other Americans, this dream was realized and then lost, part of the collateral damage of the recent economic downturn.

There is something a little off, or mysterious, or otherworldly about Bingaman's lush paintings of man-made perfection. While the paintings serve, on one level, as representations of familiarly formulaic suburban homes, the landscaped lawns of luxury resorts, and the weird beauty of country club tennis courts, they also become symbols of a psychic state, depicting what the artist refers to as the "end points" of a race that has its participants perpetually anticipating, reaching, grasping for the thing – the experience of luxury, or comfort, or beauty, or status – that promises the complete fulfillment of desire.

Bingaman's paintings want to convince the viewer of these places and the feelings they evoke, but there is also a curious slippage, a form of invention that entails a precarious balance between fact and fiction, between what is real and what is imagined.

In The Concavity, a painting that obliquely references the work of David Foster Wallace, a brightly colored tennis court is surrounded by a thick mass of foliage. Beyond the awkward, platform-like stage of the isolated tennis court, past the delineating stone wall rendered by a solid band of color, the ambient lights of a nearby city create a strange glow. The overall effect places the scene somewhere between being believable and not quite convincing us that it could really exist in the world.

From Westwood, Kansas, Bingaman transports us to the lush Hawaiian island of Maui. At the signed point of entry to a destination resort near Kaanapali Beach, Bingaman has translated a visual marker, a memory of the longed-for arrival to a particular place. Kaanapali Hyatt captures that experience of full and immediate sensory immersion we all desire from a destination we dream of reaching. The sign, surrounded by stylized landscaping, and the painting that depicts it both announce: this is beauty, you have arrived, and, yes, this is it.

- Raechell Smith

Joe Bussell seems to negotiate the spaces between dichotomies with the composure of a seasoned diplomat, both in his life and his art.

His recent living arrangements have included metropolitan areas—London and Kansas City—yet the neighborhoods in which he has lived are lush with greenery. In London, Bussell lived near Hampstead Heath, the large and venerable park known for sports fields, ponds, trails and wildlife. His home in Kansas City sits on a steep, wooded and verdant hill within earshot of I-35's hustle and bustle, 10 minutes from downtown. The rural feel of the neighborhood is illustrated by a goat that cuts a nearby lawn, yet Bussell's street is populated by clean-lined and trim mid-century modern homes.

Bussell often synthesizes ostensibly disparate tendencies. Many of his current works are small, yet bold forms within them command the compositional space as if they were monumentally sized. Vividly colored organic forms stand out against a stark white background, offset by hard-edged elements that have been drawn by hand or collaged with brightly colored tape. In some of his Silver Series drawings, concentric rings suggest the orbital paths of planets, or possibly diagrams of atoms, perhaps bringing to mind the surroundings at the Linda Hall Library where Bussell works ("the world's foremost independent research library devoted to science, engineering and technology," according to the library's website). Ultimately, the size and shape of the artist's color pools seem self-defined, and are therefore only partially controlled and partially conscious. On the other hand, Bussell's hard-edged and linear forms reflect much more of his presence and control.

Bussell also successfully weaves together various strains in modern and contemporary art, especially Abstract Expressionism and recent installation-oriented work. His pools of color recall the staining techniques of Helen Frankenthaler, while his counterbalancing of rounded and hard-edged forms evokes Robert Motherwell. The thicker paint pools and the collaged tape elements lend a sculptural feel to the work, augmented by the spindly forms that are distributed and linked throughout Bussell's compositions. Like urban sprawl, these works seem to want to reach into the viewer's space. They also bring to mind installation artists such as Susanne Gallagher, of whose work Bussell speaks fondly, as well as that of Sarah Sze and Nicola López.

The artist has characterized his work as "playful warfare" between architectonic and organic forms. Nonetheless, his drawings exude great stillness and calm, perhaps suggesting that Bussell achieves peace in their making.

If one were to imagine the unlikely convergence of pathetic, discarded, thrift store toys and stuffed animals, the fantastical imagery of the 15th century Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch, snippets from classic mid-century animated cartoon shorts, and the zany figurative works of fellow Canadian artist Jon Pylypchuk, it might look something like the drawings and sculpture of Eric Conrad. If only there were a name for this quirky sub-genre of contemporary art, then works by Eric Conrad and others whose incorporation of found materials and use of a slightly wonky aesthetic that can be likened to naïve art would be easier to describe.

Exhibited regionally, nationally, and internationally in exhibitions with titles like Anthropomorphology, Under Certain Conditions, Yesnomaybe, and You+Me+You, Conrad's works explore social psychology, emotional entanglement, socialization, and some of the various possible permutations of human existence, sometimes light and sometimes dark.

In viewing works such as Last Night (b.), one has the distinct sense that Conrad's characters are rascals, or rowdies, or just innocently involved in a circumstance that resulted from being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or, perhaps just with the wrong people. Uniformed athletes, soldiers, masked businessmen and preps clad in argyle sweaters become part of a chaotic jumble that also includes discarded musical instruments, beat-up clunkers and heavily wrinkled bed sheets. The scene is at once violent and intimate, disturbing and sensual, confounding and empathetic. At one time or another we have all been unwittingly caught up in a sallied moment, and perhaps it is for that reason that we are able to find something endearing in these figures that come straight out of an imagined menagerie of hopeless cast-offs.

Conrad was born in Toronto in 1972 and currently lives in Lawrence, Kansas. After undergraduate studies in mathematics and fine art, graduate studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and an M.F.A. degree from the Rhode Island School of Design, Conrad has settled into a creative life as an active member of the Lawrence art community and an Assistant Professor of Art and Foundation Studies Coordinator at Emporia State University in Emporia, Kansas. Distinguished grants and activities along Conrad's career path include a Pollock-Krasner grant, a Frans Masereel Centre Artist Residency, a visual arts fellowship at The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and residencies at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in Omaha, Nebraska, and Anderson Ranch in Snowmass, Colorado.

- Raechell Smith

Lawrence artist Mark Cowardin examines the complicated, sometimes troubling, and always compelling intersection between humans and the natural world. His graceful sculptures juxtapose materials and conflicting ideas, and as a native Midwesterner, Cowardin examines the complex relationship to natural resources that the Midwest sometimes embodies. The implications of Cowardin's narratives are sometimes alarming, layered, and often ultimately tinged with yearning.

In his work Cowardin is interested in the relationship between humans and their environment, both the built environment and our natural environment, and how human consumption challenges and ultimately changes our surroundings. In some of his works from the mid-2000's, Cowardin focused on faucets and other plumbing parts. He created outdoor sculptures in which giant bathroom and kitchen sinks were installed in an urban environment, juxtaposing our domestic lives with communal spaces, intersecting private and public. In other sculptures, giant carved wood faucets appear to pour liquid gold from their spouts, pooling sensuously on a gallery floor. With those works, Cowardin interprets something eccentric and exotic from an everyday, mundane household device.

Cowardin's sculptures have included container-like apparatuses and smooth wood objects, all of which focus on connections between humans and the natural world. He has also created sculptures that address the home and the objects within it, imbuing those objects with the weight of their histories and importance to the larger concept of home and all of its various meanings.

Other works combine Cowardin's love of elegant natural materials such as walnut and maple woods, with conceptual messages, especially focusing on root systems. He notes, "Roots have long been a recurring element in my work. They provide a literal connection between the space that we as humans occupy, and the ground on which we exist. I also find roots to be a beautiful metaphor for a connection to the past." In recent work he polishes ebonized walnut to a high sheen, showing a refined craftsmanship that is perhaps a suggestion of our disconnection from the natural world. In The Great Escape, an ebonized walnut branch and its roots transform into a hand that grasps the legs of a taxidermied pheasant. The pheasant, caught mid - flight, seems to attempt escape. Perhaps the hand, as nature, tries in desperation to hold on to the lovely creature that can no longer find sustenance within its grasp.

- Dana Self

Steve Gorman's ceramic interpretations of the natural form can appear otherworldly. Possessing different levels of meaning, one can interpret male and female insinuations in the work, but since neither overshadows the other, they possess an androgyny that asserts a powerful celestial intimacy. One looks at his work and debates the distinctions among undersea life, the spiritual realm and the human anatomy. All are present and all are valid, regardless of the direction your eye takes.

Gorman received a BFA in Art Education from Central Missouri State University in 1985. For the last twenty-five years, Gorman taught at the Centerview and North Kansas City school districts before retiring. Finally able to pursue his art career full time, Gorman is looking to the next phase of his oeuvre. With his work mostly table-sized, a recent 'Eureka' moment for Gorman came when he made the decision that his next progression would be to make larger work - a return to his original style when he made three-dimensional pieces that literally came out of the wall. Gorman has a new interest in creating pieces that are about "energy, forces, physical presence." This bigger size will have an effect on viewer's minds, large enough to "put your arms around them to embrace."

His work is found in the permanent collections of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art – Campus Collection, the Oppenheimer Collection, the Southern Illinois University, the Waterloo (Iowa) Museum of Art, and Baker University (Baldwin, Kansas). He is also collected privately around the world, including Saudi Arabia, Germany and Taiwan.

The installation process of his work is important. Viewers are meant to experience his pieces in the round, as a story that slowly reveals itself to the audience. Light also plays an important role in the illusions that his work seeks and from which it feeds. To spend time with his work is to be a detective and uncover their inherent themes of avarice, natural disasters, and personal defeat.

Gorman feels his ceramic forms, spray-painted with acrylic paint, are breaking down the barriers between painting and sculpture. In the beginning of his career, Gorman made three-dimensional work that came off the wall. These new pieces are the natural progression in his career. Like Frank Stella and Elizabeth Murray before him, Gorman understands the gestures of his work invoke a state that exposes different levels of meaning, revealing a riddle for the audience to interpret. The larger idiom continues to express meaning when words cannot. "Hybridized Biomorphic Abstraction" is a term coined by Gorman that defines the creation of works which continues to express things which words cannot. "People see things in my work which I never intended."

- Blair Schulman

At the age of three, a budding young artist may possess the ability to consciously render forms. In the fourth year, those forms grow more complex. Amber Hansen began her own artistic career as a four-year-old, inspired by pictures of a horse and Wonder Woman that her uncle had doodled to cheer her up during a hospital stay. As a child, her favorite subjects included Disney characters, horses and Catholic saints.

While studying for her MFA at the University of Kansas, Hansen began to revisit her early motivations for becoming an artist. Although she had no formal art education growing up on a farm in rural Iowa, the artist maintains that she gained more knowledge from drawing and painting than from any other form of learning.

This reconsideration led to a collaboration of sorts: Hansen the grown-up creating in tandem with images scrawled by Hansen the child. She projected childhood drawings saved by her mother onto seven-by-four-feet sheets of paper, traced them, and drew on top of them, responding to the earlier forms.

In Lion Man, a two-headed lion with a mane of golden yellow handprints forcefully spits male bodies into a pile at its feet. With two horizontal slashes for eyebrows and bulging circles for eyes, the noble beast appears cross. Composed of thick, blunt lines, the younger Hansen's lion contrasts the highly rendered, accurately proportioned male bodies drawn by the older Hansen. Bare-chested, with naked legs, the men wear nothing but briefs and hold poses reminiscent of swim strokes.

For Hansen, this writhing mass of nearly naked men becomes a metaphor for conformity or groupthink. The artist's themes are broad and big: society's impact on the natural world, consumerism, patriarchy. Like the lion in Lion Man, Hansen seems to consume big-picture social themes, digest them alongside her own personal experiences, and spit out a new concept.

As a graduate student, Hansen began exploring genres outside painting and drawing. The artist sought new ways of creating that forced her to leave her comfort zone. This led to video, performance, musical composition and community-based projects. Music, in particular, required her to create in a genre where she had little or no skills (unlike drawing, a method of creating she had practiced for years). Hansen sings backup in a doo-wop group called Dean Monkey and the Dropouts and performed as part of a punk group called Mammogram.

Drawing, however, remains the center of her practice. "I'm grounded in the drawings," Hansen says. "They generate and work through the ideas. If I didn't have the drawings, the other things could become too abstract."

- Theresa Bembnister

Fiber is a human enterprise, from the animals and plants from which we derive fiber, to the stains and marks that we leave on the textiles we use. Mary Anne Jordan emphasizes how textiles bear this mark and in her work, the artist's hand is fully evident. Her colors bleed, run, and smudge into one another.

Jordan is a professor of textiles, and department chair at the University of Kansas. She has exhibited her work across the United States and in Japan, Poland, South America, France, and Canada. Working with contemporary quilting methods, Jordan makes pieced and whole cloth quilts. She uses common geometric shapes and lines to emphasize the natural qualities of fiber and its relationship to everyday life. She notes, "I use fabric, color, and pattern as a means to make visual statements that magnify the perfection and flaws of everyday life; I use fabric, color, and pattern as a method to construct metaphors for our culture, lives, and bodies; I use fabric, color, and pattern as a medium to express my ideas, striving to create work that is straightforward and honest."

How we clothe and adorn our bodies identifies who we are and our status in the social, cultural, and economic structure. Jordan's checkerboard, stripes, and other simple patterns emerge from various cultures, including African. Certain African textile patterns identified different tribes, allowing individuals to recognize one another within social structures. Jordan is also influenced by Asian textiles, ancient Peruvian fiber work, and African American quilts, which originally landed in America with the slave trade.

Textiles are intrinsically embedded within domesticity, including the humble tasks of working by hand. Jordan hand-dyes her fabrics, allowing colors to run and drip, mimicking the natural path stains may take in every day living. She honors the history of women's work within the home and within the industrial arena where (mostly) women still toil over hand stitching and machine work around the world. Issues of industry, economics, consumption, and abundance surround her textiles.

Jordan's work expands to suggest the abstract paintings of Helen Frankenthaler or Morris Louis, both of whom stained their canvases. Jordan's darkly moody Homage is a nod toward the monochromatic work of Ad Reinhardt.

Mary Anne Jordan's work builds on the historical and social practice of textiles, painting, and quilt making. Part quilt, part painting, and yet fully fiber, her work recognizes that textiles have a deep and complex history that is also an ever-shifting and changeable medium with multiple avenues of expression.

- Dana Self

Lauren Mabry's art is a synthesis of abstract painting and ceramic objects. Using fantastically vivid colors and gestures, Mabry creates ceramic works that seem to defy boundaries. She creates unassuming, minimalist vessels upon which she makes gestural, abstract paintings. Treating her ceramic objects as more than what they start out to be, Mabry broadens the dialogue surrounding ceramics and painting.

Mabry builds on abstract expressionist ceramic history, developed most notably by Peter Voulkos, John Mason, Henry Takemoto and other 1960s artists. Rather than manipulating the clay as far as Voulkos did, for example, Mabry leaves her shapes clean and spare and instead manipulates the glazed surfaces. Her painted surfaces recount the vibrant hues and abstract gestures of Betty Woodman's glazed and painted surfaces.

Simple "cylinders," as she names the works, become vehicles for dense applications of glaze in abstract drips, slashes and strokes. Mabry suggests that the cylinders are circular paintings by treating the surfaces of the cylinders as she would a flat canvas. By also treating the interior of the cylinder as if it were yet another painting, Mabry creates, in her words, "new compositional viewpoints."

Mabry also takes advantage of the fragility of her medium by "breaking" the work. Fragmented Cylinder suggests an archaeological find. Her earthenware cylinder appears broken and lies on its side, as if just unearthed from a dig. The brilliantly glazed surfaces are in sharp contrast to the thick, red earthenware beneath the glaze. Mabry creates an exciting tension between the exposed and unglazed clay and the dynamically painted surface. By treating the object as if it is a fragment of a larger whole, Mabry capitalizes on the inherent instability of ceramics, using it to her aesthetic advantage.

Mabry's Curved Plane series allows her to expand her painting style along a horizontal and convex earthenware surface. She uses her glazes like paint—slashing, dripping, and mixing them on the surface of her work with different tools. Often agitated, the abstraction is layered and complex. The diptych Untitled Slabs suggests a bifurcated landscape image. Two glazed clay convex and horizontal slabs change from blue to browns to blacks and greens, suggesting ancient strata or a dreamy and distant landscape. Whatever the impulse, the objects Mabry creates feel evocative and primal.

- Dana Self

All around the world, young artists such as Ahram Park are experiencing a resurgent interest in the landscape, examining regions near and far. With an astute awareness of globalization's press all around us, artists are paying close attention to the ensuing shifts, bearing witness to both obvious and subtle alterations to the spaces we inhabit and the places we construct.

Park's simple, subtle photographs shift our perspectives and help us to see even mundane things in a new way. Historically, this is something that artists have done well. There are things we understand about the past because artists observed and captured transformation as it occurred.

For example, as industrialization took hold with radical effect in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, European and American artists created images that helped to document a rapid demographic shift. From rural to urban life, the population moved away from the land into cities where new industries held the promise of prosperity and a better life.

In more recent times, artists from China and other emerging countries are examining the complex impact of a growing global economy on local communities, creating urban and non-urban landscapes that will reveal something particular about this moment in time.

As an image maker, perhaps Park is looking for the parallels between the language of economic theory and the real-world realities. In Hybrid Seed, a stark, minimalist super-structure dominates the snowbound, "corn-country" landscape near Waterloo, Nebraska.

While nondescript from the outside, this industrial compound houses the large-scale operations of Syngenta, a Midwestern company aligned with the massive global industry of food production and genetic seed modification that is responsible for feeding a significant percentage of the world's population.

Within the city limits of Kansas City, the photographer also finds interesting and telling visual juxtapositions that few of us would ever notice on our own. Cliff Drive Kudzu portrays the once-scenic and undulating drive overlooking the East Bottoms, a non-place, forgotten part of Kansas City that has been overrun and strangled by industry. There is parallel, too, in the rampant growth of kudzu along the drive. Introduced in the 1930's for ornamental landscaping, this invasive, non-native plant has grown unchecked, taking over the landscape it was once meant to improve through beautification.

Kansas City-based artist Ahram Park offers a unique perspective in photographs that function like portraits of unexamined place and space, with a quiet subtext for viewers on topics they don't expect to encounter in visual art. With a background in Economics, a discipline he describes as a very social science, Park is documenting a landscape that is profoundly shaped by the stuff of the global economy - featuring industry, wealth, manufacturing, technology, and transportation.

- Raechell Smith

Human figures from an unknown time and place enact strange rituals. There seems to be a logic that drives them, or rules to their game, but they are unfamiliar. Who are these people? What exactly are they doing with such intensity and focus? And how did we come to bear witness? Come to think of it, who are we?

Clinton Ricketts is the creator of these eerie, evocative, exquisitely executed prints featuring characters donning blindfolds or bandages, headscarves or pointy caps, or little more than loincloths. His figures stand erect, touching palms and fingertips; gather in clusters to groom one another; or lie, slack or curled up, asleep—or dead? Hovering in the air around them is a palpable sense of dislocation, as if they have only recently arrived here and discovered one another, perhaps in the wake of some catastrophic event. Pop culture references come freely to mind—TV dramas like Lost and reality shows like Survivor; the novel Lord of the Flies, and even The Hunger Games. So, to, do Biblical stories, and references to historical religious paintings abound here. (The central figure in Ricketts's Fair and Stormy, for example, was directly inspired by a painting of a post-crucifixion Jesus by Caravaggio, circa 1621.)

Whatever specific associations we bring, what these prints do quite effectively, and affectingly, is to convey a sense of longing and searching: for connection, community, purpose, meaning. In The Bridge, two figures come together to press palms, fingertips pointed together toward the ground. This tender but purposeful touch is echoed in reverse by a pair of hands floating overhead in the gesture of prayer, reinforcing the significance, even the holiness, of this contact.

"I reinvent the world to reflect my current understanding and desires, searching for spirituality in relationships and personal connections," Ricketts has written. "[My work] investigates the importance of ritual...as an activity that provides comfort through human contact and shared history."

In works from 2012 such as The Builders and The Benders and In the Corner, this sense of coming together with common purpose and achieving meaningful connection through ritual is brought to greatest fruition. The blindfolds of earlier works have been removed and in their place are mutual recognition and collective engagement.

The etching process through which these prints were created involves drawing or scratching onto a wax-coated metal plate, then dipping the plate into an acid bath so that the drawing is permanently "etched" into the metal. The plate is then inked and printed. While the etching process enables the production of many identical prints from the same plate, each of Ricketts's prints is unique, typically incorporating several additional printmaking processes that together yield the mix of high-key pops of color, subtly hued backgrounds, and crisp, fine lines that characterize his work. His choice of the etching process "reflect[s] a desire to mimic the artists of the past, and their filtered view of their mysterious world," he writes. Marks and scratches from the etching plate enhance this sense of history and aura, while fainter, ghost-like imagery in the background suggests memories or visions, adding another layer of psychological or spiritual charge.

- Kate Hackman

Paul Anthony Smith examines status and hierarchy to illuminate the complexities found in the ordinary. Like artists Nan Goldin and Diane Arbus, whose styles blurring normalcy and voyeurism extend beyond societal comfort zones, he is creating work where life and art become intertwined.

Smith was born and raised in Jamaica until the age of nine when his family moved to Miami, Florida. Portraits and tableaus of family members and the working class life in the Caribbean are hallmarks of Smith's. He began art classes in elementary school and from there, moved up to magnet art programs in junior high and high school. For Smith, the idea of exposing himself to new people and ideas led him to attend the Kansas City Art Institute. Seeking a major in painting, within a few months his attraction to ceramics grew and he received a BFA in Ceramics in 2010.

Currently, Smith maintains a studio in downtown Kansas City as a recipient of the Charlotte Street Foundation's Urban Culture Project. He has participated in the 2010 Flatfile exhibit at the Kansas City Art Institute ArtSpace as well as the Spring 2011 America: Now and Here project created by artist Eric Fischl. He recently completed a residency at Anderson Ranch Art Center in Snowmass Village, Colorado and his work is in private collections in Miami and Kansas City.

Utilizing straight-forwarded figuration with a nod to a Pop Art aesthetic, Smith's work is a study in modern culture that mines the intricacies of rank. Paintings, sculptures and recent digital work explore and scrutinize the positions of one's place in society. People and their gestures provide hierarchal formations. At a glance, one views Smith's work and instantly recognizes the status of each person in a group.

Attracted to dark skin hues, Smith recognizes their tonality illuminates a stark distinction between them and the surrounding environment. Smith has collected thousands of images of locals and their surroundings from recent trips to the Caribbean that he uses to form his ideas.

New work such as the Systems of Hierarch series involves "picking" at the faces of his subjects. This incorporation of scarring and modification removes identity, making them anonymous. As an audience, we often place judgment on images before historical facts make themselves known. From a glance it has already been decided. Smith adjusts his images to make the work about the people as they are on the inside and not the perception. Whereas, people may partake in scarification for aesthetic, religious, or social reasons, Smith utilizes this process to impart what it means to viewers about their own issues regarding perceived notions of identity.

- Blair Schulman

Linnea Spransy's paintings are on a mission all their own. Layered ribbons of paint and dense microbial patterns scatter across her canvases, evoking deep time and inexplicable quests. In some works, skeins of color droop over dark crevices as if waiting to be sucked into a black hole.

One of Spransy's fiercest paintings, Widget, is quite minimal but is conceptually true to her artistic concerns. Composed of a Moebius strip of wicked looking blades floating in a field of heavenly pink space, it alludes to the ancient paradox "concordia oppositorum," or the agreement of opposites such as love, hate; black, white; yin, yang. In her art, Spransy seeks a state of non-duality as she simultaneously celebrates various pathways. This chronic tension explains the dynamism that underscores her entire oeuvre.

Since childhood, Spransy has studied intensely what she calls "two very robust bodies of knowledge," science and religion. Art has allowed her a segue between these different systems.

The oldest of five, Spransy grew up in Oregon with her family who were members of the Jesus People movement. Her father was a musician and played with the first Christian rock band. She rode on a tour bus with her family, musicians and a tutor to various towns where protesters invariably gathered, denouncing the mix of rock and roll with Christianity. "By the time I was eleven," she recalls, "I was living a whole-hearted lifestyle around art."

Her family eventually settled in Wisconsin, and Spransy was home-schooled while also working with artists in their studios. By 13 she was "fully trained in anatomy" and creating sophisticated figure drawings. She received a full scholarship to the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, and subsequently the prestigious MFA program at Yale.

Between Spransy's first and second year at Yale, her art changed, literally, overnight. "I experienced a spiritual transformation," she says, "a recognition of why we make art; it was a moment of honesty. . .I wanted to do something that would make my heart race." Her skill at figuration was obvious, but "it was no longer challenging me. I wasn't being forced to invent something."

Spransy began exclusively exploring abstraction. As free-wheeling, unanticipated and deliberately jittery as her paintings became, they were all constructed using "rules."

"Every piece I make," Spransy asserts, "is the manifestation of a pre-determined scheme – a system of small limits with a clear beginning and end. . .I write out a recipe composed of what I call modules [a combination of number and letter forms]; it's very time-consuming. The only total freedom I allow myself is with the color choices. The system and I will make something, but there is also a high level of uncertainty."

Ultimately, Spransy believes, her rules reinforce the notion of free will. "In the midst of so much certainty, can I still find a surprise? There is always," she notes, "consistent astonishment at the end."

- Elisabeth Kirsch

A wide block of fire-engine-red oil paint covers the center of Lean from top to bottom. Like icing on a cake or decorative swirls in ceiling plaster, the broad, thick brushstrokes swoop and arc across the height of the canvas, ending in hard edges on either side of the left-leaning red rectangle. Hints of what lies beneath the red surface appear along the right and left sides of the painting: brilliantly hued gestural forms, angular lines, thinly applied fields of color, flat black shapes.

Why does Caleb Taylor build complex layers of abstract forms, only to hide them under a solitary, compositionally dominant form? A former figure painter, Taylor firmly roots his artistic practice in the body. He likens these concealing layers of paint to human skin, a single, simple exterior encasing a complex interior. In fact, Taylor creates the guts of his paintings from a library of shapes culled from anatomy books. He makes stencils by tracing and cutting forms from diagrams and photographs of physiological structures, selecting a position for each shape and projecting it onto his canvas before painting it. This process is methodical yet unplanned. Each formal decision sets the stage for those to follow. "With each deliberate action I make," Taylor says, "something else is going to come from it."

The artist's interest in the tie between his physical actions and their connection to the forms on his canvases places him solidly in the tradition of modernism, particularly Abstract Expressionist painting. "With abstraction, I can't help but think of the role of the body," Taylor explains. "My own body bends and moves with the form." But Taylor challenges this art-historical inheritance by literally hiding the visual evidence of his physical actions, revealing only a select area of the results of his process. In his acrylic, gouache and pencil drawing White Window VIII, a four-sided polygonal opening, slightly too high and off to the right to be centered, reveals a mass of multicolored scribbles beneath a thinly painted white surface.

Taylor says that the time he spent in graduate school at the University of Montana may have manifested itself in the white surfaces of his Window series. It snows nine months out of the year in Bozeman. The artist's choice of palette for his Covered (which includes Lean) and Window series reveals corporeal connotations; red and white are the colors of blood cells.

Taylor reveals all in his recent series of cutouts. The artist fabricates a two-dimensional scribble as a three-dimensional cut-plastic, wall-hanging sculpture, developed in a process he refers to as "slowing" gestures. Again, Taylor relates this series to the body, noting the similarity of the red, looping lines to entrails. With his knots, the forms held in the skin of the Covered and Window series hang free.

- Theresa Bembnister

Peter Thompson did not start seriously making photographs – an activity he is "mad about now" – until 2005, when he retired from a multi-layered art career at the University of Kansas. For 40 years prior he taught painting and figure drawing, and served as Chair of the Art Department as well as Dean of the School of Fine Arts. During his tenure at KU, he ensured the completion of both the Lied Center and the Bales Organ Recital Hall, organizations vital to the cultural profile of the University.

An artist of apparently seamless transitions, after retirement Thompson began making artwork on his computer at home. "I just started fooling around with different programs,"Thompson remembers, as he began taking photographs while teaching himself to make digital prints.

"At first, my work was loosely based on the Golden Section," he explains, "but now it is more precisely so. . .I use it as play, and I like the geometry. There's always something elegant about the rectangle." Artists have used the proportions of the Golden Section (or the Golden Rectangle, or Golden Mean) in everything from music, architecture and the visual arts since medieval times. Essentially, it is a form that is a rectangle that can be divided into a square and a smaller rectangle that has the same ratio as the original rectangle, ca. 1.616: 1. Derived from growth patterns in nature, it is inexplicable, and some say mystical.

When he expounds on the principles behind the Golden Section, Thompson may sound like an enthusiastic math teacher, but his photographs are akin to those of a Zen master. They are highly abstracted homages to the quotidian: light reflections on the living room wall; the edge of a screen from a bedroom window. The subjects are identifiable only from their titles, and their perspectives are tantalizingly difficult to ascertain.

Thompson's most austere works, which border on the transcendental, are those taken in hospital corridors and physicians' waiting rooms. In one spectral photo taken in his doctor's office, two empty walls seem to barely merge at the corner they form, while the only visible objects are white garment hooks in the upper right-hand corner. In Waiting Room / Root Canal only the corner of a black frame floats on a wall. In one of his most elemental photos Thompson simply captured the molding strip on a hospital corridor.

Besides their formal playfulness, Thompson's images also suggest aspects of the eternal, or the abyss. Yet his photographs are completely devoid of angst, functioning more as meditations. As one traditional Zen saying advises: "While walking examine the walking; while sitting examine the sitting."

Of these pieces, Thompson declares that while sitting, walking and waiting in various clinical settings he decided: "That wall is a gift. The gift of a hospital to me."

- Elisabeth Kirsch

Davin Watne asks, "how does Man fit in the natural world?" His themes of human detritus, collisions, beauty and advertising, all turn a critical eye back on ourselves. Historically, Watne's artistic oeuvre has been Man's interaction with Nature. It shows the aftermath of the chaos Man leaves in its wake. The task of the animal kingdom to restore natural order illuminates the carelessness with which we abandon engineered materials, specifically, automobiles. This series of paintings, done over several years and also presented as installation work, calls into question whether the animals are turning the tables on Man's encroachment upon their world. This poke at modern science and psychology from both species is depicted as a battle of wills.

His more recent works are about symmetry based on Native American totemic principles. Imagery seen as kaleidoscopic imparts optical illusions representing ideals of beauty and advertising. Photo-shopped and rough-painted to leave space and spots, these pieces recreate an airbrushed quality resembling pixilation. They are an exploration of hyper-realistic attraction, questioning the culture of cool that is so forceful in our social structure. By flipping these images to a bi-lateral axis, Watne unearths abstractions, metaphors, and unintended references that infer a sexual ideology, also revealing skulls and animals.

Watne believes we "pimp our own instincts" to perpetuate a "buy and sell" mentality that is hardwired in all of us. His work takes a critical stance on our seductive influences towards one another. These paintings reflect an idea that asks us how art seduces and the way in which these crucial aspects of our psyche impact us.

Watne is a 1994 graduate of the Kansas City Art Institute. He is expected to receive an MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art in 2013. In 1995, he opened, curated and ran the Dirt Gallery, an alternative art gallery in Kansas City. Until its closure in 2003 the Dirt Gallery was one of Kansas City's earlier artist-run spaces prior to the current resurgence.

His art career has led Watne to be awarded a 2007 ArtsKC Inspiration Grant, an Art in the Loop Public Arts Grant in 2005, a 2002 Charlotte Street Foundation Award, and an Avenue of Arts Municipal Arts Grant in 2001. Watne is also a resident of The Studios Inc. program in Kansas City and teaches painting as a full time lecturer position at University of Missouri Kansas City. Watne's work can be found in the permanent collection of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Overland Park, Kansas, as well as in corporate collections throughout Kansas City.

- Blair Schulman

"Art does not render the visible; it makes visible." Paul Klee, 1918

Mary Wessel's photograms make visible. Working in the darkroom, Wessel produces images on light-sensitive paper without the help of negatives. The artist likens this process to alchemy, a precursor to modern chemistry with the aim of turning base metals into gold. Just as alchemists strove to create something precious from materials of little worth, Wessel tinkers with light, chemicals and everyday household items such as sponges and rolled-up paper towels to produce brilliant objects of beauty.

Part of the magic is that, until Wessel runs the photographic paper through the color processor, she's not quite certain what will materialize. Years of experimentation have given her the know-how to coax a particular color or effect through timing or materials, but it's not an exact science. "It's not like having a negative and making a print from it," Wessel explains. "I'm not going to get the same thing twice."

The adjective unique is overused, but Wessel's photograms fit the definition perfectly: each image is truly one-of-a-kind. Although produced through photographic processes, Wessel's images have much in common with painting. In places, her photograms recall the drips of enamel on canvas or the bleeding of watercolor on paper. But at their most essential, Wessel's works are photographs, images produced by shining light on a sensitive surface. They capture a moment in time, the play of light as it interacts with particular chemicals or translucent objects.

Despite the empirical precision involved in their creation, the images have unfixed meanings. Wessel titled her 2010 exhibition at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art Worldscapes. For the artist, the term landscape would have been too limiting. "They are little worlds that hover between nature and technology,"Wessel says. Her untitled works from the Worldscapes series have the power to evoke scores of associations in the viewer's mind. The enigmatic pictures open a window onto a variety of worlds: outer space, underwater, microscopic, and more.

In one particular untitled piece from Worldscapes, viscous-seeming sea-foam-green shapes erupt from the top and bottom of the print as stringy tendrils of golden brown emerge from the darkness behind them. Brilliant points of red, orange and blue flit across the surface. In another print, pinks, blues and black bleed into one another like a glossy puddle of oil on parking-lot asphalt. Bright white penetrates muddy mixes of golds, grays and browns. A dewy moisture permeates the series; these fixed images can't help but come across as slippery.

With her photograms, Wessel transforms the unseen into the visible. She materializes otherworldly abstractions, and her open-ended visual platforms encourage in the viewer a powerfully visceral reaction.

- Theresa Bembnister