Craig Deppen Auge (Kansas City, MO) | Exchange (Kansas City) | August 2021

This series of 24 individual “sign posts” and/ or “flags” placed in the garden and spread throughout the museum explores the concept of way-finding and personal journey. Linked conceptually to one of the the artist’s other projects, Drifters, these embody the themes of the sojourner, “finding yourself,” or unexpectedly finding yourself “elsewhere.” These clusters of lean, wordless directional or distance markers are similar, but abstracted versions, to those you might find on an old, wooded footpath. The difference being that there is no explicit direction, only a formal, coded visual language speaking of what is on the path ahead, or what lies behind. These works were constructed intuitively and urgently, using only collection scraps and hardware, giving them a folksy, southern yard-art quality. The artist is interested in the concept of the nexus, and Elsewhere certainly acts as a nexus for community and creativity. But it remains open to interpretation, and its direction is ever-changing. This project suggests all of that; a sculptural play on the puzzling, multi-vocal outlooks found at Elsewhere, perhaps pointing to a multitude of other "elsewheres."