Maria Vasquez Boyd

In Mexico, where ancient traditions blend with the tapestry of modern life, a belief exists in a mystical creature, El Nahua. Weaving its way into tales passed from generation to generation, El Nahua is believed to be a shapeshifter, transforming from human to animal at night. In some regions El Nahua is feared, capable of harm and mischief, village homes were marked with a white cross on the door to keep them away. In other regions of Mexico, this elusive creature is revered, a symbol of strength and spiritual connection. 

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The story of El Nahual is shared here with the recognition that there are elements of our world that are beyond our understanding. We are left to wonder and embrace mysteries that lie beyond the known.

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Kim Lindaberry

Fairy Tales on Main Street is a series of digital tableaus inspired by the enchanting atmosphere of my surroundings along Main Street in Kansas City, where wooded areas press quietly against streets and are illuminated by streetlights in the darkness. In these liminal spaces, everyday life is occasionally interrupted by moments of quiet wonder—when deer emerge from the trees, crows gather overhead, feral cats linger at the forest’s edge, and animals cross the street as if moving between worlds.
 

Influenced by Joseph Campbell’s writings on myth, religion, and folklore, the series approaches these encounters as contemporary fairy tales. The animals that appear — does, bucks, fawns, crows, dogs, feral cats, and occasional human figures — are not presented as documentary subjects or fixed symbols, but as archetypal presences: tricksters, guardians, witnesses, and forest spirits. In these compositions, forest animals and human figures drift through thresholds where the ordinary world gives way to enchantment that is at once playful and foreboding, echoing the dual nature of fairy tales—where wonder and unease coexist. They carry the playful yet enigmatic energies found in ancient myths and fairy tales, where animals and spirits guide, test, and reflect human consciousness.
 

Through digital tableaus, I construct personal myths rather than record specific events. Pairings of night and day, forest and street, youth and adulthood suggest cycles of transformation and becoming. A resting fawn evokes vulnerability and origin; a buck beneath a streetlight suggests endurance, memory, and passage. In several works, the figures appear to look directly at the viewer, subtly reversing the traditional relationship between observer and observed and inviting a moment of reflection and recognition.
 

These images are designed as open narratives. Rather than prescribing meaning, the work invites viewers to engage their own imagination and storytelling instincts, using the imagery as a catalyst for personal interpretation. The work functions as a visual portal, momentarily transporting viewers into a realm where fairy tales intersect with everyday life.
 

Drawing from mythology, sacred ritual, folklore, and everyday experience, Fairy Tales on Main Street proposes that enchantment has not disappeared from the contemporary world. Instead, it quietly persists at the edges of our awareness, revealing itself when we pause long enough to notice the magical coexistence between the urban landscape and the natural world.

 

Artist Bio:

Kansas City–based artist Kim Lindaberry is an interdisciplinary artist working across digital and physical media. Embracing experimentation and unfamiliar processes, his practice adapts materials and methods to serve the conceptual needs of each project.
 

Lindaberry’s work explores liminal spaces where myth, memory, and everyday life converge. Drawing from science, folklore, sacred ritual, and personal surroundings along Main Street in Kansas City, his practice reflects a world in which enchantment and unease coexist—where the ordinary becomes a threshold to the uncanny, and human presence is entangled with larger cosmic and mythic forces.

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Susi Lulaki

I’m a longtime painter who fell in love with clay and concrete a few years ago. Molding clay from the bottom up, shapes evolve magically becoming themselves, I add glazes without seeing what the color will be when fired. 

 

I’ve found my own enchanted forest from Dorothy & Toto in Kansas to the ladies with unicorns in medieval tapestries along with myths, fairy tales, and love of nature. I remix ancient Greek art involving women that are often maligned or misunderstood, such as amazons, harpies, sphinxes, Eris and Artemis. In making visible more positive energies of female, animal & plant powers, I find refuge in uncertain times and hope for harmony in nature.  

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Artist Bio:

I live in Kansas City and show at Blue Gallery. I studied painting, printmaking, and art history at various art schools.  Living in New York, Paris and Athens allowed years of studying sculpture in museums.

 

My work is shaped by a connection to nature and delight in fairy tales, myths and ancient art. Animals and plants along with imaginary and hybrid creatures express optimism for peaceful coexistence in our world today and finding joyful beauty in our differences.

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Kat Dison Nechlebová

I’m compelled to create art that simultaneously addresses both individual psychological destruction and the dynamic, nurturing aspects of the human experience. I pull a lot of inspiration from Indo-European spiritual practices, alchemical duality, and archetypal psychology. By intersecting philosophy and art, I offer insight into established psychological theory that explores and maps the depths of an individual’s psyche along with the perceptions of the world that collectively surrounds us.

 

I continuously reference these concepts in my work to understand the ideas that guide the current direction of our world. Being a multidisciplinary artist allows me to delve deeper into these abstractions using performance-based art, combining elements of sculpture, installation, audiovisual art, and sound. I aim to enhance individuals’ perception of the entirety of their surroundings, attend more carefully to what’s taking place, and appreciate our roles in this grand experience of life.

 

Artist Bio:

Kat Dison Nechlebová, M.A., NLC, ATR earned a BFA in sculpture from the Kansas City Art Institute in 2007; thereafter, she obtained masters degrees in both clinical counseling and art therapy with an emphasis in transpersonal psychology at Southwestern College in Santa Fe, New Mexico, while also graduating from the Boulder Psychotherapy Institute, becoming a board certified Applied Existential Coaching expert for Colorado licensed psychotherapists. She currently resides in Kansas City, working as an educator in the sculpture department at Kansas City Art Institute while running her private practice "Art Therapy & Integrative Counseling" providing services as an art therapist, Colorado registered psychotherapist, existential phenomenologist, and multidisciplinary artist.

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For the past decade, the scope of Kat's disciplines ranged from ancient wisdom traditions to cutting-edge developments in modern interpersonal neurobiology--including spiritually-based traditions of Jungian psychology, existential-phenomenology, holotropic breathwork, dream analysis, sound healing, existential coaching, and psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy.

Kat uses her experiences as both an artist and therapist to portray human behavioral patterns visually and experientially, providing tangible models to understand otherwise unconscious behavior. In her art, Kat explores the perpetual evolution of arts' ever persistent challenge to collective ecological, cultural, and political social paradigms.

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Vivian Torrence

 

Personal statement: "Thank you Elisabeth, for inviting me to participate in your curated exhibition of five artists of very different styles to explore The Supreme Point-Thresholds of Emergence.

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What is a Supreme Point? Is it a fixed place as a finish to a search or a summit of a climb towards new heights? Or if not space, maybe it is about time? If it is a summit, like Mt. Everest, I see the supreme point as a point not to stop and rest, but one from which to jump.

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Jumping off is something we do when we enter into creating a work of art. Walking through the studio door, crossing a new threshold, each time we are confronted with an idea or an experience of wonderment. From our world of varied experiences, I create art through the collage process. Inspired by the natural world, dream, myth and poetry, I bring elements together, synthesizing diverse pieces into some new reality. My art often depicts moments of wonder and ambiguity with shifting spaces as in a theater set. Intuition and chance always have their roles in this world of spirit. Through my collages, I hope to make spiritual transformations concrete.

 

Artist Bio:

Vivian Torrence, known for her art in the collage and print media, is widely exhibited both nationally and internationally. She is represented in numerous private collections and in public collections of The Art Institute of Chicago, Des Moines Art Center, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, University of Iowa Museum, and the Continental and Hallmark Corporations. After spending much time in Iowa, California and Munich, Germany, Vivian now lives in western North Carolina. She enjoyed teaching art at all levels. University teaching offered interdisciplinary collaborations in literature and science.

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In “The Supreme Point” four collages are from the project “Chemistry Imagined,” an exhibit which traveled with written works of Nobel Laureate chemist Roald Hoffmann and was published by the Smithsonian. Three other works from the “Auspices” series explore the idea of ancient Roman augurs observing patterns of clouds and movements of stars and animals as predictors of outcomes of future events.

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Torrence is inspired by nature and the search for some order and understanding of our world experience. The surprises that confront us in life are seen as wonders, mysteries to be figured out. Using the collage medium, Torrence realigns diverse sources of characters and spaces to merge into new realities, puzzles revealing the search for spiritual wisdom.