KANSAS CITY, MO.- Urban Culture Project is excited to kick of a new season of ambitious, provocative, multi-disciplinary contemporary arts programming on September 21, with three new exhibitions, thirteen open studios, and live performances by Quixotic Performance Fusion, all in downtown Kansas City. This Third Friday Art Downtown event launches a jam-packed year of UCP programming ahead – stay tuned.
Featuring: Quixotic Performance Fusion: ORA, la Esquina (an Urban Culture Project space).

Renowned cross-disciplinary ensemble Quixotic Performance Fusion presents “Ora,” a new production exploring the unique rhythm and power of intimate performances. “Everything in its simplest form has unlimited potential, yet it is without experience. As things gain complexity, they are shaped by history. Experience and knowledge are only obtained by stepping into uncertainty and being exposed to the elements,” says Artistic Director Anthony Magliano.

Quixotic encompasses an evolving group of choreographers, composers, visual artists, performance artists, and musicians from in and around Kansas City. The most important aspect of the group is creative collaboration - among artists, among disciplines, and among communities.

Deanna Dikeman & Nate Fors - forced dichotomy, Paragraph (an Urban Culture Project space). Third Friday opening reception: September 21, 6-10 pm. Exhibition runs September 21-October 13. Gallery hours: Thursday & Saturday, 12-5 pm.

Drawn to each others use of color and mutual interest in materials, artists Deanna Dikeman and Nate Fors will present a series of new, collaborative works completed this year. Functioning as photo-collage based paintings, these hybrid works take as their foundation Dikeman’s photographs of thrift shop clothing, fabric and costuming decorations. These images are then playfully transformed by Fors with paint, Plexiglas, fabric and three- dimensional features such as knobs, toys, shelves, insulating foam sealant, costuming decorations, etc. Over the course of this first-time art-making collaboration between the two artists, Dikeman has composed and created new photographs specifically to serve as “canvases” for Fors’ “paintings.”

The title for the exhibition, forced dichotomy, initially resulted from punning on the artists’ last names. Conceptually, however, it represents a wrestling with the separation inherent in any two artists’ work/style/methods, and an attempt to steer them toward a convergence. Dikeman and Fors are here striving to force the extant dichotomy between photography and painting away from “difference;” instead of the “or,” they hope to posit one possible end to the bifurcation with the offering of an “and.”

This exhibition is the latest in a series of Charlotte Street Foundation/Urban Culture Project efforts to reengage/reconsider/recontextualize the work of artists recognized with Charlotte Street Awards for outstanding Kansas City visual artists over the past decade. Fors and Dikeman responded to CSF’s call for proposals from past Awards recipients more than a year ago by proposing to create and exhibit a new, experimental body of collaborative work.

Both Nate Fors and Deanna Diekman are mid-career artists who have exhibited widely in Kansas City as well as nationally. Represented by Dolphin Gallery, Fors' work is included in the collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Sprint Nextel Art Collection, Spencer Museum of Art, among numerous other corporate and private collections. Dikeman's photographs are included in numerous collections including those of the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, and Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, and have been widely published, including in Photo Review and Fotophile. She is also represented by Dolphin Gallery.

Garry Noland – Slope Failure, Urban Culture Project Space. Third Friday opening reception: September 21, 6-10 pm. Exhibition runs September 21-October 13. Gallery hours: Thursday & Saturday, 12-5 pm.

Slope Failure is a site specific installation of new work by Garry Noland featuring a combination of freestanding sculptures constructed of duct tape and National Geographic magazines; wall-leaning pieces composed of stacked television sets; and wall-hung drawings – all drawing inspiration from the notion of ‘slope failure.”

The term slope failure, a cause of landslides in nature, references movement or tearing of the soil, revealing the structure of what lies underneath. Noland equates this with an artistic tearing away at existing surfaces to reveal new surfaces below. "There are many things in the non-human part of nature that we humans see as echoes of our own situation and predicament," writes Noland. "This is just one of them." Noland's work also incorporates pattern, which to him exemplifies basic conditions of our existence: "Two people standing together, talking, have no identity without the space between them," he notes. "Similarly the continent of the Americas, for instance, would have no separate identity from Europe/Africa without the space provided by the ocean. The two situations (the couple, the continents) both rely equally on the spaces between, as well as the objects themselves, for definition... each are equal...neither are 'positive' or 'negative'." Based in Kansas City, Garry Noland has exhibited extensively throughout the region as well as nationally for more than twenty years, most recently in a two-person exhibition at the Haydon Art Center in Lincoln, Nebraska. His work is included in public and private collections including those of the Anchorage Museum of History and Art, Anchorage, Alaska; Ever-Ready Battery Company, St. Louis, MO; Sprint Nextel Art Colleciton, Overland Park, KS; Grinnell College, Grinnell, IA; Continental Insurance Company, New York, NY; and Hallmark Cards, Kansas City.

UCP Studio Residency Program, OPEN STUDIOS, Bonfils (an Urban Culture Project space). Third Friday Open Studios: 6-10 pm.

New UCP Studio Residents Mike Hill, Colin Leipelt , Ted Kaldis and Jason Needham join continuing Residents Robert Glinn (work pictured, left) and Maria Calderon in opening their studios to the public, allowing visitors an inside view the artists’ processes and new work. UCP’s Studio Residency Program awards free studios for one year terms to outstanding Kansas City emerging artists.