By CRISTINA JANNEY
Hays Post

Horses that emerge from a tangle of roots, bright bugs made of fused glass and dancers frozen in time by a single shutter click all will come together in a single show that opens Friday at the Hays Arts Center.

The main gallery is featuring “Intermittent Musings,” a career retrospect of glass and mixed media art from Stan Detrixhe. The Founders gallery will host “Unwrapping Life,” mixed media carving and ceramics by Terri Horner. Also featured will be “In Motion, Dance photography by Michael Strong.”

The opening reception for all three exhibits will be from 7 to 9 p.m. Friday at the Hays Arts Council.

Stan Detrixhe

Detrixhe, 66, works in a variety of media including fused glass, reverse painted glass, oil and collage.

Detrixhe is a a Hays native, but studied at San Diego State before moving back to Kansas. He started working with in glass in 1983 when he working as a designer for High Plains Stained Glass. The company designed and repaired stained glass windows. Although there is not as much demand for it today, Detrixhe still offers commercial stained glass work as well.

One of the larger pieces of glass work in the exhibit includes several wire panes featuring bugs.

Detrixhe said he chose the subject because he saw them as a challenge.

“What is an extreme example of what you could do with fusing and still have it hold up?” he said. “So I thought of all the little legs on the insects coming off as being very, very delicate, and then the middles of the insects are very, very strong. I was trying to determine if those two things were compatible.”

Advances have been made in fused glass, but when Detrixhe started there were issues with compatibility in different colors of fused glass. One color of glass can solidify before another, which will cause the glass to crack.

All the insects in this piece of artwork were modeled after actual insects. Detrixhe researched the anatomy and features of the insects as he was creating the pieces.

Another challenge for Detrixhe is painting reversed glass. As the name implies, all of the painting has to be done in reverse on the back of the piece of glass. He said he likes the effect that is achieved in the final product. As light hits the front of the finished pieces, it makes the color seem even brighter than the original paint.

Detrixhe has several large collage pieces in this exhibit. Some are abstract and others look more like a traditional paintings.

He created abstract brown, blue and green collage pieces by chance. He started snipping pieces out of magazines and gluing them on a background, and it just kept getting bigger until it was several feet tall. A second piece followed. The third green piece in the series he created from digitized images.

He said even if he is going to create a finished piece in another medium, such as oil or glass, he likes to use collage to create a first impression of what the finished piece will look like.

Two oil paintings will make a reappearance in this exhibit from a former Hays downtown bar. The bar used to be in the basement of what is now Coldwell Banker Executive Realty, 1001 Main. The paintings were donated to the HAC when the bar closed.

Terri Horner

Horner, 61, Great Bend, is a cosmetologist by trade, but went back to school and earned her bachelor’s degree in art from Fort Hays State University in 2009.

Although Horner’s formal education came later in life, she has always loved art and drawing. Today she is a sculpture. Her favorite media is wood, and she often uses cedar.

“Wood and stone are particularly nice because you uncover what is in there,” she said. “What I see I can bring to light for someone else to see that they might not otherwise find in there.”

Horner gave several examples. A piece that was chosen for the 2018 Smoky Hill Art Exhibition at the HAC depicts horses carved from the roots of a hydrangea bush. The roots were a gift from a friend’s garden. Horner said she turned the root around and around and upside down, but all she could see were the heads of horses in the tangled wood.

A thin sculpture of a women was inspired by a knot that Horner imagined as the women’s hair. In yet another piece depicting Eve, the nape of the woman’s neck, her hair and the curvature of her face were all determined by the grain that was naturally in the wood.

“The fact that I like three-dimensional work and it’s more comfortable to me, I think is because I have worked on a 3-D pallet my entire life working on hair,” she said, “because that is an art in and of itself.”‘

Another piece was inspired by her in-laws, Ralph and Edna Horner. The wood sculpture features a faded, ghostly image of the couple when they were young. A cast of their hands is in an opening in the wood below. On the back of the piece is inscribed a excerpt from a love letter Ralph wrote to Edna when he was stationed in Africa during World War II. He worked as mechanic in the Army Air Corps. They wrote to each other every day.

“I really wanted to honor them in a sense, because No. 1 they were awesome people,” Horner said. “They were just the kindest, sweetest people ever. They were also so in love. Dad died in ’93, and they were every bit in love at that moment as the day they met. They were such an inspiration and an example.”

Several of the pieces in “Unwrapping Life” also depict animals, such as a lion, monkey, giraffe and elephant in wood and polar bears in Italian ice alabaster.

“I have just always been an animal lover or that’s just what’s there,” she said.

Horner is branching off in new directions. She is working on an independent study at Barton Community College in ceramics. Although it was not ready for this show, she hopes to be able to show that work soon.

Michael Strong

Mike Strong started shooting photos in the 1967 when he took a photojournalism class in college. That was the only photo class he took, but he had found his passion.

He couldn’t find a job as a photographer right out of college. He kept finding jobs for reporters, so he became a photographer who wrote. Today he is primarily a dance and performance photographer. Strong formerly lived in Kansas City, but is now living in Hays.

His exhibition “In Motion: Dance Photography by Michael Strong,” shows examples from years of perfecting the art of photographing the movement and emotion of dance.

“It never, never stops for me,” he said of the dance photography. “This is always perfection. I am always perfecting. There is nothing else as interesting or exciting for me because there are always changes in moves.”

Strong said he didn’t really understand dance photography nor was he any good at it until he took tap lessons. He started to see new aspects in his photography and better understand the timing that goes into dance after he started to dance.

“I didn’t know what it was, but I knew my pictures were different from the normal newspaper people who came in, who clearly didn’t see what they were looking at,” he said. “To see something, you have to know something. To know something, you have to do something.”

When Strong is going to photograph a performance, he starts attending rehearsals as soon as possible. He makes notes about the timing of the movements.

When he shoots, he does not use continuous shooting. Every image is captured with a single click of the shutter. He said this has forced him to choose his shots more carefully and perfect his timing. Several photos in the exhibit will include consecutive frames of a single subject to show how this techniques shapes Strong’s photography.

Strong also shoots with an ultra-wide angel lens. This allows him to be very close to his subjects, but still capture a broader image.

“For me, this is about perfecting and never quite getting there,” Strong said of his photography, “but always staying on an edge. I have a tell I have for myself. If I find myself thinking it is too easy, I stop because it means that I am not paying attention. I start doing a quick little inventory of where I am at in the dance. I do a quick little inventory of all the setting on my camera. That puts me back in the mood. You have to be on edge in some way, shape or form.”

He never shoots a posed shot. They are all images made in the moment.

“I call these my transitive [shots] like a transitive verb. You know you need an object that comes after it,” he said. “These are transitive in the sense they are coming from somewhere and going to somewhere rather than just jumping up and boom there you are.”

Although Strong started shooting ballroom dancing, today he photographs the American Youth Ballet, University of Kansas dance and University of Missouri Kansas City dance as well as other events and companies.

By BECKY KISER
Hays Post

A fourth major traffic element has been added to the plan for improvements to the Hays North Vine Street corridor between 32nd and 41st Streets.

The project has been in development the past 12 months by the city’s consultant, WSP Engineers of Lenexa, the Kansas Department of Transportation (KDOT) and city staff.

“Our engineers [WSP] hired another engineering firm to do an independent review of the whole plan just to make sure we got another set of eyes on it,” said Jacob Wood, assistant city manager.

The nationwide firm Kittelson & Associates specializes in transportation projects.

“One of the things that they recommended was that we put in what we’re calling the ‘teardrop’ on the south side of I-70.

“It’s not a full roundabout but what it will allow is traffic going eastbound to pull off of the interstate, go through the tear drop, and go directly north,” Wood explained.

“The old plan would have had them going south, and coming around the roundabout and then going north. This will make it a bit easier to come off the interstate and go north, if they want to do that.”

Traffic studies and modeling determined the teardrop would alleviate some of the congestion at the 37th Street roundabout.

“We looked at doing [a teardrop] on the north side of I-70 but there’s really not enough room to do it between the interstate and the intersection. So [westbound traffic] will still have to pull off the interstate and go north through the roundabout to then head south on Vine.”

Plans are to build two-lane traffic roundabouts at 32nd/33rd, 37th, and 41st Streets, plus the teardrop at the eastbound I-70 exit ramp.

Adding the teardrop increases the total project cost from an estimated $7.6 million to approximately $9 million.

In early December the city was awarded a $6 million federal grant from the Department of Transportation for the Better Utilizing Investments to Leverage Development (BUILD) Grant program for the North Vine Street Corridor Project construction.

The remainder of the project cost will be paid through a two percent increase in the Transient Guest Tax (TGT). It went into effect Oct. 1 and is projected to raise $6.2 million over 20 years.

On January 9 city staff attended a meeting in Topeka with representatives from the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) and KDOT to discuss how the project is to be administered. KDOT will act as the pass-through agency in letting the bids and managing the project.

“We’ve had conference calls with them, both KDOT and Federal Highways, and will continue to do that as part of the process as it goes forward.

“Anytime you do a project of this magnitude on a state highway at the intersection of an interstate, you’re going to have those players involved anyway. But they’ll probably be a little bit more involved this go around [due to] the federal money.

Wood says the concept plan is now “pretty well refined.”

The city has been meeting with business owners along Vine Street throughout the corridor.

“We’ve been having conversations and, actually, some of those have resulted in changes to the plan. Those guys that work on Vine have the operator-level kind of knowledge that maybe city staff and engineers don’t see.

“For the most part, the meetings have been positive.”

The city will host a public meeting and open house Tue., Feb. 12, 5:30-7:30 p.m., at The Venue at Thirsty’s Brew Pub & Grill, 2704 Vine. Information will be presented about Vine Street corridor improvements, including the proposed roundabout solutions. Detailed models of proposed changes will be on display to show the capabilities of roundabouts and how they improve safety for vehicles and pedestrians.

“We’ll see if there’s any feedback that may require adjusting or tweaking the plan, and we’ll still be able to do that. But we’ll really start kicking on the design pretty heavy after next week.”

Utilizing the federal funds required a slight shift in the work timeline.

Design will continue until October or November. Once the design plan is finalized and approved, bids will be let with a construction start expected in the summer of 2020.

“It’s a long road and there are a lot of regulatory requirements, which we would have to deal with regardless of whether we got the federal dollars,” Wood added.

By CRISTINA JANNEY
Hays Post

Wind turbines are thought of as environment-friendly sources of energy, but for bats, they are a death trap.

Amanda Adams, instructor of biology at Fort Hays State University, talked to a capacity crowd Monday night about the plight of the bats during a FHSU Science Cafe presentation titled “Bats: The Rock Stars of the Night.”

Adams said bats are being killed by the millions by wind turbines.

Curious creatures, the bats are drawn to the turbines, where they are either struck or killed by a low pressure field that surrounds the turbines.

“When you go out and you are driving and you think ‘How majestic,’ in my head I think ‘It is a death count,’ ” Adams said. “It’s really awful.”

Researchers are trying to develop deterrents that will keep bats away from the turbines. They have investigated using sound to dissuade the creatures from approaching the turbines, but that has not been effective.

A type of fungus found in caves is also killing some species of bats by the millions. White-nose syndrome first appeared in U.S. caves in 2006. It has proven to be 99 percent fatal to bats in the caves were the fungus has been found.

Although researches have found chemicals that could kill the fungus, conversationists are concerned about the effect spraying would have on soil quality, Adams said.

Although bats are often confused with rodents, they are in a completely different mammalian group. They also live very different lives. Rodents have short lives and reproduce quickly. However, bats may only have one young per year, and can live anywhere from six to 20 years. The oldest bat on record lived to be 45.

Because bats’ reproduction is slower than rodents, killing a bat has a much greater impact on the bat population. They are also slower to rebound from environmental disasters, such as the white-nose disease.

A quarter of all mammal species are bats with 1,300 species. They live on all continents except Antartica. Sixteen species of bats are found in Kansas — eight in Ellis County.

“That is the reason why I am in love with them. The incredible diversity of bats that are out there makes it really fun to study them and learn about them, because they are always doing something weird and breaking rules and you can never make a generalization about bats,” Adams said.

Bats in that diversity have some incredible adaptations. California’s spotted bats can hear the footsteps of a cricket on the ground. Common vampire bats have specialized heat sensors in their nose that allow them to locate blood-rich areas in the skin of their prey.

A species of bats that lives in the tropics make their own tents out of banana leaves and then they “cuddle” together like a hand full of cotton balls.

A Central American species has suction cups on its wrists. This helps the bats stick inside leaves at night when they rest.

The largest bat in the world is the flying fox and has a wing span of 6 feet. The smallest bat is called the bumblebee bat, which weighs less than a penny and could fit on the tip of your thumb. Both of these bats overlap range in the Philippines.

All the bats that live in North America are insect eaters. Depending on species, bats prey on insects both from the ground and catch flying insects, such as moths, in mid-air.

Some bats are carnivores. They eat frogs, fish, birds, reptiles and rodents. Some species that eat frogs have an special adaptation to let them know they have preyed upon a poisonous frog before they eat it.

Sanguivores or vampire bats have all kinds of incredible adaptations to consume blood, Adams said.

Common vampire bats can run along the ground. They land on the ground and climb up their prey, such as a cow or goat. They make a very small incision in the animal’s skin. An anti-coagulant in their saliva helps keep the animal’s blood flowing while they “daintly and gently” lap up about a tablespoon of blood with a curled tongue, Adams explained.

The bat’s metabolism is so specialized they can’t skip a single night of feeding or they will die.

Bats are essential to the environments in which they live. Bats save U.S. farmers $23 billion annually in pesticide costs and reduce crop damage. Many bats eat their weight in insects each night.

They are helping regrow the Latin American rainforests. Up to 95 percent of “pioneer plants” in cleared land come from seeds dispersed by bats.

If you like tequila, you can thank bats for that too. Bats pollinate more than 500 species of plants, including the agave plant from which tequila is made.

Conservations are urging agave growers to become more bat friendly. Typically, agave is harvested for tequila before it blooms. This cuts off a food source for the bats and results in inbreeding of the agave plants.

Some growers are allowing at least some of their agave plants to flower to help the bats and promote biodiversity in their crops. When you are at the liquor store, look for bat-friendly stickers on tequila bottles.

Adams’ recent research has centered around echolocation. She has conducted research in which she has tried to determine how bats echolocate in groups. This line of research has indicated that bats use jamming avoidance. When they are in groups, they mutually suppress their signals in essence making fewer sounds to avoid conflict with other bats.

Bats will also shift their call on the sound spectrum to differentiate their signals from the bats around them.

The sounds bats use for echolocation is at a much higher frequency than can be heard by humans. However, in addition, to using sound to find objects and prey in low light, bats also use lower frequency sound, some of which humans may be able to hear, as social calls.

If you find a bat, don’t touch it. If you must move it, use gloves or a towel. Adams said she will not rescue you from the bats, but she will come rescue a bat from you. Call 979-393-2062.

The next Science Cafe will be at 7 p.m. March 18 at The Venue at Thirsty’s, 2704 Vine St., Hays. Cat Sartin, FHSU instructor of biological sciences, will present “The Bare Bones About Dinosaur Growth.” The lecture is free and open to the public.