Butch M and Aaron Dougherty

October 3-31 Main Gallery

Butch: I'm the creator, fabricator and metal sculptor, autodidact by training, combining new and found carbon steel creating representational or figurative abstractions. Most of my fulfillment comes from the creative process; each being an experiment of expression. Beyond a simple chalk figure on my work bench, the finished sculpture lurks behind my eyes. Some would say that leads to misguided imperfections, but I call \\\"corrections.\\\" As I'm producing my sculptures, there's definitely a period where I spend time just getting acquainted with the piece, providing me direction.  

I create to instill a degree of spectator confusion inviting the viewer's scrutiny and participation. Although in recent years I've focused on equine sculptures, I don’t see myself being trapped by a leitmotiv, but definitely captured by geometric shapes identifying with the Modernist. I am taken by the layering three dimensional effect seen in paintings by Braque that best describes what Donald Baechler defined, and I borrow, \\\"editing.\\\" For now, each production is a study and as said by the poet and lyricist, Ancel Neuberger, never expecting perfection, as that would eliminate the search, and for me, the end.

butch’s sculpture practice came late in life as he searched for a meaningful form of expression and creativity when leaving behind a wonderful professional life as a pulmonologist. He was mentored by his long term friendship with Bonnie Baxter and Michel Beaudry, both recognized as accomplished artists, giving him hints, encouraging him without dogma. Murphy’s life long partner, Corva, with her foundation in Art History, provided an academic data base. butch continues benefiting by the support of the members of Oval Table, an artist salon organized in 2016, and other collegial artists. Along with Corva, he formed in 2017 and continue to produce another stimulating organization, The Art Soirée Series, where 2 artists, from all creative forms, quarterly explore with an interactive audience their life of creativity, be it performance or visual arts.

Early on, he exhibited in galleries in Columbia, Missouri, with a solo show of 7 sculptures at the Ashby Hodge Gallery of American Art(2018) at Central Methodist University. In 2022 he was approached by The Bunker Center for the Arts, Kansas City, Missouri, to show 7 recent horse sculptures in the spring of 2023, titled, Selected Works by butch. The exposure opened new excitement for his works. A Kansas City Art Critic, John Hastings commented on butch's sculptures as "that arresting line common to anything neolithic has me looking at all sorts of animals. From horses to humans. To pieces by "butch,: who takes that line and finds the sweet spot." His sculptures have also been described by sculptor and Professor, Rick Salafia, as good examples of "analytic abstraction" that doesn't leave the sources behind yet manages to avoid direct representation." 

With Murphy’s networking, he developed several ongoing venues for public display of his works in Mid Missouri, Kansas Flint Hills, the Kansas City metro area, De Soto, Kansas, South Carolina and Oklahoma. Although he has focused on horses for models, he explores other forms of pure abstraction. After opening his atelier(studio) in 2011, he has now completed 62 equine sculptural abstractions among other creative forms. In 2021, he was advanced to a higher level of acknowledgement when one of his sculptures standing across the street from the Kemper Museum of Modern Art in Kansas City, was stolen and with the exception of its tail, it was never recovered.

Aaron Dougherty

Words are able to represent only the tiniest fraction of possible thought.  They can only provide waypoints in a continuous spectrum of meaning, and then only by convention.  We can all speak the word ‘joy’ but that single syllable can only begin to communicate one individual’s actual meaning or emotion to the mind of another.  And more to the point of photography, words have very limited power to explain or describe images.  Words come from the brain’s left hemisphere, images are ‘seen’ and recognized in the right.

I find words, concepts, and statements are antipathetic to my work as a photographer.  I personally struggle to silence the verbal narrative that happens involuntarily in my mind as I look at the world.  My eye and right hemisphere will find some view or scene that resonates in a way I can’t verbally describe, so I willfully attempt not to try.  And to conceptualize an artistic goal in advance, or to rationalize the capture afterwards destroys that wordless experience.

The exercise I employ most in my work is photographing buildings, walls, telephone poles that aren’t pretty, aren’t ugly (to my mind, anyway) — just unremarkable.  Meaningless scenes that posses no intrinsic beauty or quality, represent no particular issue or subject.  Visual Rorschach Tests.  Koans.  The more I can strip away the distracting noise my verbal left hemisphere creates, the better my visual right hemisphere can operate.

I have recently discovered Formalism as a 'critical position', born late in the 19th century, and I strongly identify with that discipline.  In his 1890 manifesto titled Definition of Neo-Traditionism, Maurice Denis writes:

"Remember, that a picture, before it is a picture of a battle horse, a nude woman, or some story, is essentially a flat surface covered in colours arranged in a certain order."

Aaron Dougherty studied architecture at the University of Kansas, completing a Bachelor’s degree in Environmental Design in 1981 and a Bachelor’s of Architecture in 1982. He studied sculpture for a semester at Kansas City Art Institute in 1987 and in 1995 earned certification i secondary education at Avila College, Kansas City. He is a registered architect, practicing from 1983 to 2009 — and taught high school chemistry in 1996/97 at Shawnee Mission West High School in Kansas. In 2009 he launched Aaron Dougherty Photography, freelancing primarily in architectural and interiors photography. His work has been exhibited at venues in and around Kansas City, and has been published in several periodicals including Fraction Magazine, El Croquis, Architect, Architectural Record, Architecture-Boston and Photo Review. His photography was shown in 2023 at the A’23 AIA National Conference; San Francisco — and in 2016 at the GAA Foundation’s Time-Space-Existence Exhibit at the Biennale di Venezia, Italy.

Dougherty currently lives and works in Kansas City, MO.

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