Artist Statement

Our familiarity with a place can impair our ability to see clearly (and in new ways) a community in which you have a long relationship.

That is what makes the exhibit interesting and different - something the exhibit title hopeful conveys: Click: TWO decades | ONE community.

Dan White has curated color photographs (first taken in 1985) and paired them with new black and white portraits of community members offering an interesting combination of places and people.

The community, in this instance is Independence, Mo truly located in the middle of the country but once was the far edge of the burgeoning nation’s western European frontier. Now this part of the country gets lumped into a vast expanse and disparagingly referred  to as “flyover country.”

But people anywhere are interesting and this particular place has an extraordinarily rich history not fully told in this exhibit but worth exploring. That history can be limiting because it encourages well-established community members to “remember its past” often to the detriment of the present and apparent, but not acknowledged change. Diversity, in all its aspects, comes to mind.

Four decades between the photographs provides new perspectives on the ever changing, ever evolving nature of community - never static, always changing.

The exhibit provides a visually compelling way to reconsider the community resisting the unimaginative “then and now” approach showing how a place or building has changed. 

Any community is first and foremost the people.

The black and white portraits - all taken in the Englewood Arts Center - reflects this growing diversity and include a World War II veteran (numbers who are dwindling) and teenaged brothers who are Scouts.

In another 40 years, we are confident of our own absence but hope some enterprising photographer might update this project with some more “clicks” providing another fresh view of that community at that time.

We deeply appreciate the encouragement and support of the Englewood Arts Center in creating the opportunity for art - in a variety of mediums - is shared and “where art lives.”

Dan White & Brent Schondelmeyer

October 2023