Jill
Downen
Kansas City, MO
Downen’s art envisions a place of interdependent relations between the human body and architecture, where the interchanging forces and tensions of construction, deterioration and restoration emerge as resonant thematic possibilities. Downen, an assistant professor and chair of sculpture at the Kansas City Art Institute, has created the post-modern site- specific work, An Architectural Folly From a Future Place — a seemingly functional structure that in reality has no purpose other than to be the subject of contemplation.
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Swope Memorial Drive
Viewing Hours:
Dawn to Dusk (6 a.m. - 6 p.m.)
Jill Downen
An Architectural Folly from a Future Place
Medium: Concrete and Lapis Lazuli or equivalent
In architectural terms, a “folly” is a built structure that has no identifiable function other than to showcase the design skills of the person who designed it. Set within a pastoral landscape, this absence of a practical rationale positions the folly as a kind of respite from the ongoing challenge of bending nature to man’s will, substituting a decorative whimsy for the principle of practicality. Jill Downen, who is an assistant professor and chair of sculpture at the Kansas City Art Institute, has designed a sculpture adjacent to the memorial for Colonel Thomas Swope that envisions a place of interdependent relations between the human body and architecture, where the interwoven forces and tensions of construction, deterioration and restoration emerge as resonant thematic possibilities. While maintaining its outer appearance as a kind of falsified ruin/fragment from a building that might have once stood in its place, Downen’s folly also fulfills the more humble purpose supplied by ruins everywhere: a place for a momentary rest and an opportunity to survey the surrounding landscape.
Swope Memorial Drive
Viewing Hours:
Dawn to Dusk (6 a.m. - 6 p.m.)
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