SHERRY LEEDY CONTEMPORARY ART

2004 Baltimore Avenue, Kansas City, Missouri 64108 - 816.221.2626

For Immediate Release:

Contact: Sherry Leedy, Director

sherryleedy@sherryleedy.com

Judy Miller: Imaginary Dioramas

Misty Gamble: Primping and the Currency of Worth

March 4 - April 24, 2010

Opening Receptions: Thursday, March 4 & Friday, March 5, 2010, 7- 9 p.m.

Gallery Hours are Tuesday through Saturday 11:00 - 5:00 and by appointment.

Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art is pleased to present two provocative and darkly humorous solo shows by artists Misty Gamble and Judy Miller. Although each artist is uniquely individual in her approach to the subject of cultural stereotype, the gallery installation reveals similarities and differences that compliment the work of both.

Judy Miller: Imaginary Dioramas

In the series, Imaginary Dioramas, photographer Judy Miller has created a new and convincing photographic reality populated by celebrities, all seemingly frozen at the peak of their public stereotype. Attracted by a wide range of subjects, Miller is voracious in her pursuit of photographic information as fodder for imagination. Meticulously bound together, diverse and seemingly contradictory people, places and things are persuasively maneuvered into rich and provocative composites that add up to an alternate reality.

In Outtake#2, Lucille Ball seems in a trance, frozen in the act of cooking, in a slightly spooky kitchen, where everything looks familiar but seems slightly off kilter. In Outtake #16, Woody Allen is shown deep in thought, but seems unlikely in the dark parking lot of a Teepee Motel. Miller’s photographic deception is so skillful that a double take may be necessary to realize that the figures Velveeta-like complexions are due to the fact that they are the ultimate kitsch, wax duplicates of the real thing.

Judy Miller has long been intrigued with wax museums and when digital technology expanded photographic possibilities, she revisited Madam Tussaud’s in 2007. It was the chance encounter of an image of a John Wayne wax figure combined with a sunrise in Monument Valley that revealed to Miller the iconic potential of her photographic composites and initiated this series. The viewer enters Miller’s photographs through the stage door and discovers an American reality myth, ripe with meaning and stoked with enough fuel to fire up the imagination and the intellect. Judy Miller is a pictorial synthesist with nearly perfect vision.

Misty Gamble: Primping and the Currency of Worth

The installation Primping and the Currency of Worth by Misty Gamble is inhabited by a group of three pastel colored, life size, seated ceramic women helmeted with gigantic hair posed in Chanel suits accompanied by one armless “stump” of a women companion similarly coifed. Nearby, a pile of 100 individually slip cast shoes with name brand logos are piled in a domestic setting and a line of tan hands gesture and beckon, showing off enormous diamond rings, as they emerge from the wall just above the wrist. These exaggerated, darkly humorous and proper ladies-who-lunch, thinly veneered with pleasantry and social decorum, literally screech with the perversities of a maladjusted world leaving the viewer to squirm in their presence.

Misty Gamble is interested in women and their role in society. Among the questions she asks are: “How do power and beauty relate to women in a patriarchal world? How do woman empower or disempower themselves...” Gamble grew up in Los Angeles where glamour and high society was intermingled with Disneyland and often traveled with her father, a well-known puppeteer, throughout the world to present puppet shows. That experience gave her insight into the importance of provocation through visual cues. In her current sculpture Misty Gamble’s use of the dualities of caricature and realism, the importance of costume and propriety prod us to question the roles of social behavior and privilege, status and women’s equality, vulgarity and perversity, while we often laugh uncomfortably.