The Spaces Between

The

Lynn Benson Robert Bubp Tim Stone

Spaces

Between October 21, 2020 — January 3, 2021

We see space in its unadulterated conceptual form, as a boundless arena — the unlimited

personal forces meet. The paintings, collages, and installation pieces in this show relay the palpable tension that exists between

and incalculably great expanse in which every

dichotomies—the natural geographical

material thing exists and in which all our human

interruption of rivers vs societal politics of water

actions occur. Undisturbed, it is a zone of amplitude with dimensions of height, depth, and width. Inside space we abide and perform.

Yet our concept of space is not static. The vast tract of emptiness where the substance of our human activity overlaps with the greater world does not remain inert and constant. Chinks, clefts, fissures, gaps, and disruptions occur.

Our idea of space deviates and constricts, edges limit. In the narrow interval between things or parts, an intervening, interstitial space materializes. This space ultimately shifts under tension, creating borders and contested space.

Using words liminal, implicated, and invented respectively, Kansas City artist, Lynn Benson and Wichita artists Robert Bubp and Tim Stone present works in this exhibit, IN THE SPACES BETWEEN, which evidence the temporal, colonized, cross-pollinated, psychic and uneasy intersections that occur at the interstices where geographical, cultural, political, and

(Benson), the socio-political disconnection between human interactions in public spaces (Bubp), and the dissonance between the ordinary and superlative, and the natural and artificial (Stone).

Ruth Moritz

The spaces in between are both constrained and charged.

Lynn Benson The space is both aloft and grounded. Levitating, one enters the geomorphology of spillway and flood plain, oxbow and spur. The trajectory of the eye swings wide then narrows between cut bank and shoal. Can one indulge in the anthropomorphic urge to locate within this protean space? An onlooker cannot point and assert, “there is the river” for that at which you pointed is no longer there.

One navigates between what was — and suddenly, is not.

Moved by her geographic origins, a barrage of water-related news, and the soaring perspective of landscape provided by satellite view, LYNN BENSON has focused her attention on the sinuous lines where water meets land on the skin of the earth.

Considering all the parts that make a whole, Benson’s view of space is wide. Yet she frames intimate sections of mapped locales where river waters meander in the spaces between landforms. Every unraveling line or edge in her work represents a mutating body of water in the tangle of human event or environmental and political struggle. Each river’s boundaries and

lines compel the viewer to recognize the story or concern about that place.

The breadth one senses in the paintings in this exhibit reveal an interconnectedness in their familiarity. Yet, if the viewer narrows the aperture just a bit, the twisting and intertwining shapes push toward abstraction. Has one been here before? In other works, in what she refers to as “side-trip photos,” Lynn seines for different angles, taking cross-view images to create a fragmented series. She then later separates ‘drops’ from the fragments and collages them to form another cross-pollinated, environment inside petri dishes. She states that this most recent orb series “reflects a psychic space in which the unseen and the unknown infects our understanding of what is real.”

Ruth Moritz

Born near the ocean, Kansas City based artist Lynn Benson has spent her entire working career in arts roles including teaching art, arts and culture research, and exhibition curation.

Always a news junkie, for the last 10 years, she has coupled her deep affinity and long-time concern for water with mapping and the power of the internet as primary research tools in her midwest studio. The meandering satellite-view lines of world rivers and shorelines, and stories of shrinking aquifers, rising water, and chemical spills, lead her to specific places where water meets land as the direct inspiration for design exploration and abstraction, and new concepts

employing oil paint, ink, pencil, fabric, vellum, collage, printmaking, photography, and fresh mixed media forms to reflect on the politics and poetry of these fragile places. She has been awarded artist residencies at Escape to Create in Seaside, Florida; the Tallgrass Artist Residency in the Flint Hills region of Kansas, and The Studios of Key West Artist Residency. Benson has exhibited her work nationally and regionally.

Public collections include Capitol Federal Hall, The University of Kansas School of Business, and The Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art at Kansas State University.

San Joaquin / Sundarbans (Diptych) 2018 Oil on canvas 36 " x 84"

By degrees (Mahakam River delta) 2020 Oil and acrylic on canvas 36" x 36"

Orbs: Long Horizon 2020 Archival print, acrylic, film, pigment pencil, thread 6-1/4" x 7-1/4"

The River Herself (Kansas River at Deep Creek) 2018 Oil and acrylic on canvas 36" x 36"

Mapping Data, Covid-19 2020 Inkjet print, polyester, acrylic, 8-1/2" x 11"

Orbs: Solitude (Blue) 2020 Archival prints, acrylic, film, pigment pencil 7" x 6"

Diamond Springs (Flint Hills) 2018, Oil on canvas 36" x 36" Against the wind (Lower Colorado River) 2018 Oil on canvas, polyester film pigment prints, brass 36" x 36" Istanbul 2012 Oil and acrylic on canvas 32" x 28"

Orbs: Exhale Landing 2020 Archival prints, acrylic, film, ink, pigment pencil 9" x 7" Orbs: Vulnerable 2020 Archival print, acrylic, film 6-1/4" x 6-1/4" Orbs: Floating, 2020 Archival prints, acrylic, film 6" x 6-1/2"

Orbs: Ubiquitous 2020 Archival prints, acrylic, film, ink, pigment pencil 6" x 8" Hormuz 2019 Archival print, acrylic, film, ink, pigment pencil, 8" x 5-3/4"

Robert Bubp The space is both personal and political. Entering, one senses a force field that repels and attracts.

Charged with history yet of-the-moment, one stands on uncertain ground. Can any visitor, tracing rhumb lines of a map, realize destination as a place to which one truly arrives? Charting movements, you begin to interrogate your right to be there; already you have become an interloper in this space.

Both civic and solitary, one belongs —

and does not.

Concerned with questions relating to public vs private, tourist vs. local, citizen vs. individual, ROBERT BUBP directs his attention to contested areas where questions of privilege, power, and control contend with our movement within those domains.

Reflecting the current politicized landscape, Bubp’s work investigates openly shared spaces now monitored and policed. Who gets to occupy them, and how does the mounting friction unsettle our expectations of who we are and where we stand in relation to each other as

citizens within these interstitial, public arenas?

Raising such questions, Robert interrogates a political dynamic the viewer is hard-pressed to ignore.

A map presents an outline of a physical place based upon things fashioned outside of it. In this exhibit, Robert’s maps constrain public disruptions to controlled instances on the gallery wall even as the viewer taps into dynamic circumstances spread over multiple locations. Immersed in a welter of lines, one becomes a mutual participant. Robert’s concept of occupied space further extends to an amassed heap of t-shirts with visible texts ‘occupying’ the floor. Two videos overlap at odd angles, reflecting temporal moments in film yet extending beyond into fluctuating space. The spectator is anchored inside a groundswell of human activity with eyes lifted to a moving point above the fray. One stands in the presence of what, in the gallery, is already a retrospective moment.

Ruth Moritz

Robert Bubp completed a BFA in Drawing &

in 2006. In 2010, Bubp was honored with the

Painting at the University of Georgia in 1993

university-wide Award for Creative Activity for

and MFA in Drawing, Painting, & Printmaking at

recognition of an ambitious creative agenda

Georgia State University in Atlanta, Ga. in 2002.

including creative projects on campus and

Bubp has won numerous grants and university

in the regional community. He has exhibited

awards, including a Master Artist Fellowship

widely across the U.S. and internationally, and

from the Kansas Arts Commission in 2005, the

his work has appeared in local and national

WSU College of Fine Arts Excellence in Teach-

publications including the Atlanta Journal-Con-

ing Award in 2005 and again in 2015, the WSU

stitution, ArtPapers, and Art in America.

College of Fine Arts Award for Fine Arts Special Endeavor for initiation and development of the downtown student gallery, WSU Shift Space,

Geo Logic: Spatial Disruptions, Mexico City Metro, June 2017 2018 Acrylic, tar, acid etch, transfer, pencil on steel.

68" w x 95" Peaceful Protest, Annville, pa (Terri Ortwein) 2020 Acrylic, tar, acid etch, transfer, pencil on steel.

30" x 40" Johnson Square to City Hall, Savannah, ga (Jill Sandberg) 2020 Acrylic, tar, acid etch, transfer, pencil on steel.

30" x 40"

8 Laps Around the Park (one for each minute George Floyd was choked), Garden City, ks (Michael Knutson) 2020 Acrylic, tar, acid etch, transfer, pencil on steel.

30" x 40" Over the Delaware River, Narrowsburg, ny (Tracy Callard) 2020 Acrylic, tar, acid etch, transfer, pencil on steel.

30" x 40" We Met at Memorial Park and Walked Up Main Street, Shawano, wi (Liz Vukelich) 2020 Acrylic, tar, acid etch, transfer, pencil on steel.

30" x 40"

June 14th, Udine, Italy (Wayne Young) 2020 Acrylic, tar, acid etch, transfer, pencil on steel.

30" x 40" Necessary Trouble Gear t-shirts, post-it notes, tables 2020 Dimensions variable Learning to Love the Apocalypse Right Now video projection, risers 2020 Dimensions variable

Tim Stone The space is both inner and outer. Angles widen, fold, collapse. This is a domain one steps into both familiar and contrived. Perceptible, yet invented, one submits willingly to this manipulated environment. “Am I the only one here? Have I been here before?” Arrested, the beholder lingers in a liminal space, occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary. You would find it difficult to leave.

Caught at a threshold, one neither arrives — nor departs.

Intrigued by what he perceives as a “constant tension between the ordinary and the superlative. . . between natural and artificial,” TIM STONE conceives work where space itself becomes the substrate upon which he creates.

Desiring each artwork to exist in the expanse between his visible first and last marks, Stone’s pieces become panoramas in which the viewer explores freely within the ricochet of line. Coupling the inner with the outer, Tim experiments with the concept of “pushing space back.” It is easy to imagine oneself being the only outsider experiencing that space in that moment.

With bold swashes of color on a canvas or precise edges overlapping each other on paper, Tim’s paintings and collages establish an invented reality that appears familiar and accessible. His canvases exhibit a largesse that manage to counterclaim a room; his tape paintings expand as one deciphers their image incrementally. His careful montages, on the other hand, are more discrete and intimate. While their surface appeals to one’s inclination to examine the merger of layers which overlap every cleft, fissure, and interval, the eye apprehends the piece as a seamless whole. Foreground and background converge. Inside or outside this created space, the beholder inserts his or her own memory of being there or not being there.

Ruth Moritz

Tim Stone graduated from Wichita State

teaching both Drawing I and 2D Design. He

University in 2012 with a BFA in Painting. He

was chosen as one of fifty Wichita artists to be

was accepted to the New York Studio School

included in the book Wichita Artists In Their

of Painting, Drawing, and Sculpture in 2014

Studios by Sondra Langel and Larry Schwarm.

where he participated in a summer drawing

His show “No Middle Ground” exhibited at

marathon program with Graham Nickson. That

City Arts in Wichita, KS in 2018 was reviewed

same year he began instructing both drawing

by Curt Clonts for KMUW’s radio segment “An

and painting classes for adults at Mark Arts in

Artists Perspective”. He is currently pursuing

Wichita, KS. In 2016 he was the instructor of

his MFA at Wichita State University and teach-

record for Life Drawing Studio at Wichita State

ing Foundation Drawing, 2D Design and Life

University and until 2018 he was an adjunct

Drawing Studio.

instructor at Bethany College in Lindsborg, KS, Water Valve 2020 Acrylic, oil, and spray paint on canvas 48” x 48”

Untitled (Aberration) 2019 Acrylic and oil on canvas 87” x 63”

So Monstrous and Final 2020 Acrylic, oil, and spray paint on canvas 84” x 84” Collection of Connie Bonfy

Fake Fake 2020 Acrylic, oil, and spray paint on canvas 48” x 60”

Flag, 2020 2020 Acrylic, oil, spray paint and tape on canvas 36” x 60” Aftermath 2019 Acrylic, oil, and spray paint on canvas 48” x 48”

Invented Landscape #48, 2019 Collage and oil pastel on bristol 11” x 14” Invented Landscape #50, 2019 Collage and oil pastel on bristol 14” x 22”

Invented Landscape #59, 2019 Collage on bristol 24” x 38” Invented Landscape #62, 2020 Collage and oil pastel on bristol 24” x 38”

“Psychogeography thrives as an interrogation of uses walking as an act of insurgency, portraying space and history; it compels us to abandon – at the collisions between public and private space. least temporarily – our ordinary conceptions of Using etched steel, video, and interactive the face value of a location, so that we may quesinstallations, Bubp asks us to consider the right tion its mercurial history.” to occupy these grey areas and how it feels Siobahn Lyons, to travel within other people’s spaces. Stone The Converastion, 2018 questions our experiences of space through surreal interiors and imagined landscapes. His In our current political climate, all space feels paintings and collages hint at the familiar, yet contested. It is hard to read the news or peruse remain undefinable, creating feelings of tension social media today without encountering the and anxiety that reflect our current unsure many conflicts and tensions that exist within times. Benson, Bubp, and Stone depict physiour current cultural climate. Many times these cal space, often specific, in their work, but also tensions can grow from the spaces that we ocnavigate the psychological and aesthetic space. cupy and how we believe space should be used.

The artists weave between our understanding Who makes decisions about precious resources, of what is real and the unseen forces that shape about how water is used? How cities are naviour spaces. Placemaking and social practice gated? How does space affect the distribution become part of the conversation. of income and the passing of wealth?

Artists are adept at helping us navigate these spaces. The three artists featured in this exhibition, Lynn Benson, Robert Bubp, and Tim Stone, explore how the spaces between evolve, expand, and become sources of tension and conflict while offering ways that we can mend the fissures.

Lynn Benson’s paintings and collages focus on rivers and waterways, creating abstracted images from google map views. The rivers she chooses often represent areas of conflict: trade routes, oil spills, pollution, areas where the access to resources is contested. Bubp’s work

From 1957 through 1972 the Situationists International (SI) was a group of artists active in Paris, France. Walking became a medium and space was co-opted for use in their experimental practices, which included walking and exploring their urban environment. Derive, or Drift, became a regular practice of the SI. Artists would walk through their environments with no preconceived destination or route, following no maps, taking cues from the landscape, and their experience in it, as to where they would go next. This practice, meant to provide the artist/ walker with a new perspective of place and jolt them into awareness, evolved into the concept of Psychogeography.

Psychogeography was defined in 1955 by SI founder Guy Debord as “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.”It has also been defined as “a total dissolution of boundaries between art and life” In The Spaces Between we see the artists as mapmakers, helping us navigate these undefinable landscapes. Not cartographers in the classic sense, although maps appear and reappear throughout the exhibition, but the work dives deeper, past the surface of the roads and outlines of the rivers. Benson, Bubp, and Stone play in the psychogeography of their spaces.

Their work urges us to think, an interrogation really, of how we move through space and interpret it. The transition of space from one user to another, dissolution of boundaries, and evolving histories become apparent. Their maps reveal what places do and how they evolve instead of what they are.

Image Credits Cover: Tim Stone, Invented Landscape #62 (detail), 2020 Robert Bubp, Geo Logic Spatial Dissonances (detail), 2018 Lynn Benson, San Joaquin / Sundardans (Diptych) (detail), 2018 Second page: Tim Stone, No Middle Ground, 2018 Robert Bubp, Geo Logic Spatial Dissonances, 2018 Tim Stone, Aftermath (detail), 2019 Lynn Benson, Orbs: Exhale Landing (detail), 2020 Lynn Benson, Hormuz, 2019 Robert Bubp, Geo Logic Spatial Dissonances (detail), 2018 Lynn Benson: Lynn Benson, San Joaquin / Sundardans (Diptych) (detail), 2018

Gretchen Boyum Robert Bubp: Robert Bubp, Geo Logic Spatial Dissonances (detail), 2018 Tim Stone: Tim Stone, Invented Landscape #62 (detail), 2020 All images courtesy of the artists unless other wise noted.

A heartfelt thank you to the “SAC Circle of Patrons” for their generosity: Bill and Jane Alsop Roy and Donice Applequist Mike and Mary Nell Beatty Bennington State Bank Bruce and Marilyn Benyshek Mike and Debra Berkley Karen Black Blue Beacon International, Inc. Shannon and Jo Buchanan Bill and Ruth Cathcart-Rake Clark, Mize & Linville, Chartered Mark and Angie Coble John and Debbie Divine Bob and Mary Exline Rob and Kelli Exline Jeff and Lynn Gillam Great Plains Periodontics John and Kristin Gunn James and Brigid Hall Saralyn Reece Hardy Wes and Joan Jackson George Jerkovich Peter and Sara Johnston Mark and Carolee Jones Gary and Lana Jordan Paul and Carol Junk Jeff and Paula Knox

Mary V. Lemon Dahx and Colleen Marrs Mary Lou and Joe McKenzie Robert and Kim Moeller Sallie and Richard Morrison Dusty and Wendy Moshier Bill and Kathleen Pierson Martha Rhea John and Alison Riekhof Rex and Carol Romeiser Bob and Linda Salem Salina Vortex Corp.

Mary Shaffer Boyd and Heather Smith Morrie and Sydney Soderberg Melanie Terrill and Mike Soetaert Connie Stevens Marilyn and Dan Stone Paula Fried and Brad Stuewe Keir and Ashley Swisher Harley Hamilton and Guy Walker Patricia Traxler and Pat Wallerius Mark and Carolyn Wedel Gary and Mary Anne Weiner Margie Wilson Travis and Melanie Young

The Spaces in Between is underwritten by John & Debbie Divine and Rob & Kelli Exline.

Salina Art Center is a nonprofit contemporary art and education center founded in 1978 in Salina, Kansas. Accredited by the American Alliance of Museums since 1991, the Art Center’s mission is “to create exchanges among art, artists, and audiences that reveal life.” Supporters include artists, educators, and community members who envision a center to engage people in art experiences of quality, relevance, and significance to our global community. A heartfelt thank you to our patrons, sustainers, advocates, and benefactors for their generosity.

Salina Art Center is supported in part by donors, members, underwriters, foundations, the City of Salina, the Kansas Creative Arts Industries Commission, which receives support from the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency, the Mid-America Arts Alliance, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

242 S. Santa Fe Ave Salina, KS 67401 10.21.2020 — 1.04.2021 Text by Ruth Moritz and Gretchen Boyum Design By Abby Crawford Images courtesy of the artists Exhibition design by Gretchen Boyum and Daniel Picking