Opening October 3rd, 2025 | MAIN GALLERY
on view at KCAC Galleries October 3rd- 31st, 2025

butch Murphy

I'm the creator, fabricator and metal sculptor, autodidact by training, combining new and found carbon steel using what some would describe primitive tools producing representational or somewhat figurative abstractions. My sculptures start with a thought and maybe a simple chalk drawing on my work bench, evolving as part the rewarding process. You might even seeing me in the studio acting out a pose. Stealing the words from Jackson Pollock, as I'm producing my sculptures, there's definitely a period where I spend time just getting acquainted with the piece, providing me direction.  

I create to instill a degree of spectator confusion and in the words of John Yau, "ambiguity trying to invite the viewer's scrutiny" and participation. Although in recent years I've focused on abstracted equine sculptures, I don’t see myself being trapped by a leitmotiv. However, I am definitely captured by geometric shapes. Some might describe my works as a conceptual, but I'm not informed enough to understand and categorize my theme or style. I am heavily influenced by the Cubist. I am taken by transparency as well as the layering effect used by Braque to appear three dimensional with impasto. So in place of paint, I may layer with sheets of steel. Each production is a study and as said by the poet and lyricist, Ancel Neuberger, never expecting perfection, as that would eliminate the search, and for me, the end. 

Aaron Dougherty

NARRATIVE

The exercise I employ most in my work is photographing buildings, walls, telephone poles that aren’t pretty, aren’t ugly (to my mind, anyway) — just unremarkable.  Meaningless scenes that posses no intrinsic beauty or quality, represent no particular issue or subject.  The more I can strip away the distracting noise of my verbal left hemisphere, the better my visual right hemisphere can operate.  And these commonplace scenes hold my eye for reasons that, say, a blue sky does not.

Formalism is the movement I most identify with:

“Remember, that a picture, before it is a picture of a battle horse, a nude woman, or some story, is essentially a flat surface covered in colours arranged in a certain order.”  —Maurice Denis

Aaron Dougherty studied architecture at the University of Kansas, completing a Bachelor’s degree in Environmental Design, 1981 and a Bachelor’s in Architecture, 1982.  He studied sculpture for a semester at Kansas City Art Institute in 1987, and in 1995 completed certification in secondary education at Avila College, Kansas City.

He is a registered architect, in active practice from 1983 to 2009, and taught high school chemistry in 1996/97 at Shawnee Mission West High School in Kansas.  In 2009 he began Aaron Dougherty Photography, freelancing primarily in architectural and interiors photography.  

His work has been exhibited at venues in and around Kansas City, and has been published in periodicals including Fraction Magazine, El Croquis, Architect, Architectural Record, Architecture-Boston and Photo Review.  

His photography was shown in 2023 at the A’23 AIA National Conference; San Francisco—and in 2016 at the GAA Foundation’s Time-Space-Existence exhibit at the Biennale di Venezia, Italy.

Dougherty currently lives and works in Kansas City, MO.