If you’ve lived in Wichita for any length of time, you’ve probably seen artist Greg Johnson’s work without realizing it. He created the pink car that appears to have flown into the side of the Auto Body Complex building, easily visible from I-135.
Johnson, who’s owned the body shop for 46 years, now spends more time creating art than he does on his old day job. He and 11 other artists are staging a large and eclectic exhibit called The Mothership Has Landed at CityArts through June 1.
More than 160 pieces of sculpture, painting and photography make up the exhibit, which takes up the main gallery and upstairs Board Room Gallery.
The show grew out of a meeting in a Commerce Street gallery some 20 years ago between Greg Turner and Mark Walker, two of the artists with works in Mothership. Turner recalls Walker introducing himself “even though artists are real funny about coming up to a new artist.” They exhibited together, then invited others to join a group that calls itself “ID…ology.”
“I started seeing other artists and said, ‘Let’s have some fun,’” Turner recalled.
The group’s name was inspired by Freud’s theories about the subconscious, although those theories play no role in their art (at least not consciously).
The current show is the group’s sixteenth and first at CityArts. “The thing I like about (ID…ology) is we look for people who come from different directions — academic, self-taught, realist, surrealist,” Johnson said. “That’s why it’s not a repetitive show.”
The group also keeps things fresh by inviting a couple of guest artists to each show. Sculptor and painter Beth “Piglet” Vannatta of Halstead is one of them for the current show.
“There’s so much difference here,” she said of the works in the “Mothership” show.
That’s no exaggeration. One artist, Ed Lang, makes sculptures and mobiles featuring flying saucers. Anne Krone paints 6-inch-square landscapes. Then there are the large metal sculptures created by Johnson from wrecked car bodies. His body shop gives him all the tools needed to twist them into fantastic shapes, weld on additions and then paint them. “Doing collision work is actually commercial art,” Johnson said.
One piece, called Cousin Shoebox Tiki, is made out of parts of a 1950s Ford Shoebox he found in a hedgerow. It resembles a totem from the South Seas and, thanks to a recording trigged by a motion detector located under its belly, chants “ooga-ooga” when people near it.
Johnson estimates that the average age of artists in the show is 75, although he might need to recalculate after Vannatta clarified her age for him, saying, “I’m not 87 ‘til the 22nd.”
If you go
Admission is free to CityArts gallery, located at 334 N. Mead in Old Town Square. Hours of operation are 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday-Thursday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Friday, 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday and noon to 5 p.m. Sunday. Most of the works in Mothership exhibit are for sale.
