By Laura Spencer
Kansas City, MO – Nearly 40 employees of the downtown Jackson County Courthouse, including current County Executive Katheryn Shields, are featured in a new $100,000 public artwork, a digital fresco called Vault. Photographs were turned into watercolor portraits, then re-photographed and transferred to adhesive vinyl. At a dedication ceremony yesterday (Wednesday), New York based artist Chris Doyle said the work is intended to create discussion.
Doyle: the most that I can ever do really is hold up a mirror to your community and let you see yourselves in a different way, and that has been kind of any underlying theme for me also.
Starting today (Thursday), Chris Doyle begins his next public artwork in Kansas City: the $1.3 million installation at the downtown Sprint Center. Doyle will hold videotaping sessions in the metro area as local residents leap on a trampoline. The footage will be used to create images of Kansas Citians flying across moon-shaped video screens.
Note: Some Jackson County legislators have been critical about the inclusion of current County Executive Katheryn Shields and the expense to taxpayers. In response to this, artist Chris Doyle says, "Whenever your make a piece of work, the most you can hope for is that it is in some way a generator of discussion. And I truly am blessed in this case to have made something that was such a joy to make, but that also has a provocative quality that gets people talking." Doyle says including Katheryn Shields is a nod to her role in establishing the Jackson County Public Arts and Preservation Program. It's similar to Kansas City's one percent for art program which sets aside for art one percent of public funds used for the construction and renovation of civic buildings. And as part of the 10 million dollar renovations of the 1933 Jackson County Courthouse, $100,000 was spent on public art.