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Please join Artlandish as we host the beautiful artwork by Larry Kantner and Kathy Unrath for the month of October.There will be a special reception on October 15 from 6 to 8 PM.
We will have live music and refreshments!
Beyond Seeing
Dialogues in Pareidolia and Layer Meaning
To look is an act of the eye, to see is an act of the soul. Beyond Seeing is an invitation to step across the threshold of the visible world and enter the quiet], luminous space where memory, image and imagination dissolve into one the lens based inquires of Larry and the stratified mixed media works of Kathy, this exhibition functions not as a gallery of static objects but as a map of the subconscious. It is an exploration of the spaces between when is given, what is hidden, and what is made.
Larry’s lens-based approached captures the vestiges of form thorough the phenomenon of pareidolia. His lens isolates the accident syntax of the world – the fleeting face in the walls, the shadow that mimics a gesture, breath of a silhouette in the milieu. These images do not merely record a moment; they evoke a presence. Kathy’s work answers this optical poetry with tactile depth, sealing images beneath the translucent skin of layered wax. The wax operates as time itself does; blurring the sharp edges of fact, burying old narratives, and requiring the viewer to gaze through the beautiful fog to discover the quiet geometries resting beneath the surface.
This collection is unified by a shared phenological philosophy: an art work is never truly finished until it is met by the gaze of another. Rather than dictating meaning, each piece is accompanied by a short narrative and a title that offers little explanations, clear answerers, or descriptions. They are left intentionally open, serving as poetic fragment and quiet provocations.
These texts are peers to the artwork, designed to set up a fragile, three-way dialogue among the surface of the image, the whisper of the words, and the internal landscape of the viewer. By compelling the eye to wander from art to text and back to the art again, Beyond Seeing creates a private echo chamber for the mind. We do not invite you to decipher our intentions; we invite you to trust your own. Ultimately, this exhibition reveals the stories we find in the shadows and beneath the wax are not ours alone – they are the reflections of who you are.
Larry Kantner & Kathy Unrath. 2026
Beyond Seeing
Dialogues in Pareidolia and Layered Meaning
Larry Kantner
My contribution to Beyond Seeing features selections from four interconnected photographic series. Each invites the viewer to move beyond direct documentation and search for the hidden narratives waiting beneath the surface. My pareidolia work is also lens-based, beginning with photographs through which I discover forms and figures hidden within ordinary surfaces.
The Shattered Series was born entirely from chance. While wandering through Luxembourg on a quiet Sunday, my iPhone swung freely from its wrist strap. Unbeknownst to me, it was capturing a rhythmic sequence of my pant legs as I walked. Reviewing the images later that evening, I discovered these accidental, fragmented images. Developed as 10 × 14-inch colored prints, they began to change before my eyes. The psychological phenomenon of pareidolia took hold, revealing hidden forms, faces, and structures within the chaos of the random frames.
The Happenstance Series explores a similar psychological territory. Photographed in Egypt, these works began as images of ordinary objects and unexpected arrangements of color and form. Only after the shutter had closed did another image begin to reveal itself. What had first appeared to be one thing became something entirely different through the act of sustained looking.
The Walls of Giza Series began with photographs of partially demolished apartment buildings near Cairo. When adjoining structures were removed, their interior walls remained exposed—fragments of paint, wallpaper, handwriting, structural scars, and the outlines of rooms and stairs once inhabited. These remnants suggested the lives of families who had occupied those spaces. Looking at the walls, I began to imagine the histories they carried and the stories of people no longer there.
The Tribute to Rothko Series grew from these same deconstructed walls. When some of the photographs were turned on end or isolated through cropping, the weathered areas of paint and plaster became fields of color that reminded me of Mark Rothko. What began as documentary photographs of damaged buildings became quiet abstractions in which color, surface, memory, and absence could exist together. In alignment with Rothko’s own practice, these specific works contain no accompanying narratives and are simply titled by their colors, allowing the pure visual field to speak for itself.
Across these four series, the photograph is not simply a record of what stood before the camera. It becomes a beginning—a surface through which another image, another memory, or another story may emerge. The camera records what is there; the mind continues looking until something else appears. In that space between what is seen and what is imagined, the viewer becomes part of the work.
A little bit about Larry:
I was born in Wapakoneta, Ohio. In 1960 I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in art from Otterbein University. After teaching a few years I began my graduate studies, receiving my masters and doctorate at The Pennsylvania State University with majors in Art Education, Painting and Printmaking. I taught at Indiana University and for two summers in Nepal for USAID. In 1971 I accepted a dual professorship in the Dept. of Art and the Dept. of Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Missouri which I held until my retirement in 2003. I also served as the Coordinator for the Art Education Program, Director Graduate Studies of C&I, and as Chair of the Art Department. In retirement, I continue to work in my studio. My work has been exhibited internationally and in numerous local, regional, and national juried exhibits.
Artist Biography
Kathy Unrath
Kathy Unrath is an A/R/T/ographer—an artist, researcher, and teacher—whose practice interweaves fiber arts and scholarship. Her career in art education spans from teaching in middle school classrooms to serving as a tenured professor of art education at the University of Missouri and Director of the Art Education program. This trajectory reflects her deep commitment to understanding art-making as both an expressive and pedagogical act.
Working primarily with fibrous materials, mixed media, and found objects, Kathy creates visual environments that explore the in-between spaces where memories and materiality converge. Through her creative practice, she continues to investigate the delicate and often overlooked moments that bind personal experience to place, history, and the quiet resonances of memory.
Beyond Seeing
Dialogues in Pareidolia and Layered Meaning
Kathy Unrath
My work begins with the belief that images hold stories—stories that are not always immediately visible. I am drawn to the spaces between what is seen and what is remembered, and to the traces of experience that become embedded within places, objects, and photographs. Through layers of translucent materials, wax, pigments, and imagery, I construct works that invite the viewer to look beyond the surface and discover what lies beneath.
Each piece becomes a kind of archaeological site. Rather than offering the narrative all at once, I bury fragments within layers, allowing images, textures, marks, and materials to partially reveal themselves and then recede again. The viewer is invited to become an archaeologist—to slow down, sift through the strata, follow visual clues, and uncover the fragments of a story. What emerges is not necessarily a single, predetermined narrative, but a space where memory and imagination can meet.
The layering process is both physical and metaphorical. Like memory, the materials obscure, preserve, distort, and transform what came before. A photograph may become a fragment of a remembered place; a mark may suggest something half-forgotten; a translucent veil may conceal as much as it reveals. I am interested in this tension between revelation and concealment—the moment when something begins to emerge and the viewer completes the story through their own associations.
The accompanying texts are an integral part of this excavation. They are not explanations or captions, but fragments of narrative—another layer through which the work can be experienced. Moving between the artwork and its words, the viewer encounters two forms of storytelling: one embedded within the material layers and another carried through language. Together, they create an open-ended dialogue, allowing meaning to shift between what is seen, what is read, and what is imagined.
In Beyond Seeing, I invite the viewer to look slowly and curiously. To sift. To uncover. To linger with what is partially revealed. The stories within these works are not mine alone. They become complete only when another person brings their own memories, experiences, and imagination to the layers.
I invite the viewer to cross the threshold, look beyond the surface, and discover the stories that emerge where nature, culture, memory, and generations converge.
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111 S. 9th Street, Columbia, MO, United States
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