Opening & Artist Talk: Background Listening Post

Opening and Artist Talk

Please join Goethe Pop Up Kansas City for the opening of Background Listening Post. Inverting Surveillance, a location-based photographic and sound installation by American artist Steve Rowell followed by an artist talk, Rowell will discuss his experiences developing the project while living in Berlin and the influence that the history of Cold War era Germany has had on his creative work.

The doors will open at 6:00 pm to experience the exhibit. The artist talk will begin at 7:00 pm.

Steve Rowell is an artist who works with photography, moving image, sound, installation, maps, and spatial concepts to produce complex multicomponent works. His practice investigates terrains of perception, nonhuman intelligence, ecologies, and technology in the landscape. Steve contextualizes the morphology of the built environment with the surrounding medium of Nature, appropriating the methods and tools of the geographer and archaeologist. From 2001-2013 he was Program Manager at the Center for Land Use Interpretation in Los Angeles. Born in Houston, Steve has been based in Los Angeles, Oxford, Berlin, Washington, D.C., and Chicago over the past twenty years. Currently, he lives in Minnesota and is Assistant Professor of Photography at the Kansas City Art Institute.

Awards and honors that Steve has earned include the Erna Plachte scholarship at the University of Oxford; grants from Creative Capital (Emerging Fields) and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts; artist residencies at the Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik and Fogo Island Arts; as well as fellowships at the Villa Aurora Berlin, the University of Applied Arts Vienna, and Newcastle University. In Spring 2019, Steve was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship.

Steve’s work (collaborative and solo) has been exhibited internationally at a range of galleries and museums, including the 2006 Whitney Biennial, Storm King, The Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, California Museum of Photography, Yerba Buena Center for The Arts, LACMA, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, The Barbican Art Centre, The Architecture Foundation London, Nottingham Contemporary Museum, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst, and Deutsche Bank Kunsthalle, Berlin.

The exhibition Background Listening Post will be on display at the Goethe Pop Up Kansas City until Wed, Nov 27th, Tue-Sat, 12pm-6pm.

Image © Steve Rowell