The best and most extraordinary artists will be those who every hour snatch the tatters of their bodies out of the frenzied cataract of life, who, with bleeding hands and hearts, hold fast to the intelligence of their time. — Richard Huelsenbeck (from the Dada Manifesto 1918)

I think that being a woman is only a brief period in one’s life, Mary Kelly (in conversation with Maria Walsh, Art Monthly, 2011)

Foot Stomp is an exhibition of new work by Leah Tacha. Tacha has long employed collage as a powerful engine to engage oppositional forces inside of a single discrete object or surface. Citing the influences of Hanna Hoch and Sophie Tauber-Arp, Tacha’s smart combinations of unexpected imagery, techniques and materials are often culled from personal spaces and relationships. This exhibition includes screen printed fabrics, video, work on paper, and sculpture. Understood first and always as collage, the work connects to the historical reverberations of Constructivism, Dada and The Pictures Generation. Optimism and joyful thriving under impossible societal conditions. Stabbing toward usefulness, choking on the absurdity of the quest. 

Foot Stomp is a gesture, a moment or an action that can either be a dancing foot set free or a child’s frustrated movement. The dangers of motherhood are at the forefront. Tacha employs a playful approach to something serious but inherently alive and free. Her vocabulary includes spinning botanicals, textile patterns, baby hair blowing, the awkward gesture, a chic and deliberate palette. Ceramic plus wood plus metal, markmaking and screenprinting, video, object, fabric. Leah Tacha has spent 20 years coaxing discrete works out of her strange, specific combinations, but since the birth of her children the stakes have been raised.  Sensory pleasures of formal aesthetics and ethics of contemporary motherhood inhabit the same object space as collective and personal anxieties around climate collapse and capitalistic avarice. The end result is the smashing together of disparate images and materials; an untethered belly laugh at our shared contemporary disorientation.

There is a possibility to digest the work through a single object: a hand built ceramic form with  photocollages fired onto each surface or a screen printed fabric or a work on paper. Taken together there is a broader logic – Tacha’s materials surround and reflect. They subvert our expectations of usefulness and reject clear boundaries between domestic and institutional, autobiography and formalism.

About 3west KC: 3west KC was founded by sculptor Mark Cowardin in 2024, and features regular exhibitions by local emerging artists. Situated in the studio that Cowardin shares with Alex Anderson, 3West is one of several artist-run galleries in the Holsum buildings in Kansas City's West Bottoms. 3West is open primarily by appointment at 1106 Santa Fe. Please email 3westkc@gmail.com for more information.

instagram: @3west_KC