April 18-June 28, Opening Reception Saturday, April 18 at 3pm.
Mary Gordon McFall is a printmaker and an abstractionist. Grant Snider is an author-illustrator and comic artist. Both artists apply buoyant shapes and colors to generate narratives that seemed designed for adults seeking the inner life of children. All visual art employs shape but these artists are highly conscious in their use of fundamental shapes to explore our sub-conscious selves (Gordon-McFall’s MFA thesis was entitled Shaped by Play while one of Snider’s published books is The Shape of Ideas).
As we know, the brain is divided into two hemispheres. There is a widespread generalization that the right side of the brain is the “creative” one while the left is the “linguistic” and “rational” side. Given the left’s hemisphere’s capacity for spoken language and the right’s reputation as the “silent hemisphere,” neuroscientists have long considered the right hemisphere to be inferior, subservient, even primitive.
Iain McGilchrist, author of The Master and His Emissary, believes this view is profoundly mistaken. The right hemisphere, which is by far the most adept at visualization, is also the part of the brain that understands music and metaphor. There are very good reasons to believe that music actually preceded the development of language and that poetry came before prose. In this way, McGilchirst believes, it would seem that language actually developed in the right hemisphere but is “deployed” in large part by the left. Hence, the “master” in McGilichris’s title is the right hemisphere and the “emissary” is the left.
There is another notable skill that the left hemisphere seems unable to master: empathy. When we activate parts of the brain that respond to poetry, music, and art it would seem that we are also putting ourselves in a place to understand the other.
Both Snider and Gordon-McFall seem to believe that play is a very serious matter. Play in this sense is very different from entertainment, which seeks mainly respite or distraction from the “productive” life. Play is fundamental to child development. It is the way we begin to explore our world and to understand ourselves in relation to it. And in relation to each other; by imagination we begin to see the emotions and intentions of the other, which is to say we develop empathy. If play is one of the fundamental ways we shape our self-understanding, then, as these artists remind us, we stop playing at risk to ourselves and others.
Grant Snider is an award-winning author and illustrator. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The Kansas City Star, and The Best American Comics 2013. He lives with his family in Wichita where and has a day job as an orthodontist.
Mary Gordon-McFall is a printmaker in Manhattan, KS. She holds an MFA with an emphasis in Printmaking & Book Arts from Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia, and BFAs in Printmaking and Painting from Kansas State University where she teaches art foundation courses.