EXHIBITION IMAGES | WORKS | PRESS RELEASE | ARTIST PAGE
June 7 – 23, 2014
HALSEY MCKAY GALLERY is pleased to present, Other City, Matt Kenny’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Using a variety of tools to map the psychology and geography of New York City, Kenny presents three interrelated modes of practice. More poetic than factual, Kenny’s sense of survey manifests as a series of monotype collages on panel, glitched imagery from Google Earth and Venn diagram inspired paintings on aluminum – all executed with virtuosic craft. Breaking down the urban landscape into highly subjective archaeological and anthropomorphic investigations, Kenny utilizes these subcategories in an effort to seek a new understanding of his surroundings.
Kenny skews the ubiquitous black plastic bags of New York’s bodegas by tenderly and laboriously inking their thin film and running it through an etching press. The resulting facsimiles appear simultaneously photo-realistic and arcanely abstract–elevating and keenly reflecting the spirit of their origins into ghostly indexes. Using the panel as a neutral plane, these visages are delicately cut out and arranged like so many museum presentations of arrowheads, jewelry, masks or ceramic shards. The institutional presentation is further implemented in Kenny’s paintings on aluminum panel, which speak the educational language of textbooks or motivational literature. Rendered in sign painters enamel, Kenny’s diographic images describe various elements of the urban psychological landscape. Depicting shattered action, these pictures can be read as triumphant achievement or emotional collapse – humorous or menacing. The haze of interpretation is both a theme and a tool for the artist. This branch of inquiry is most evident in Kenny’s Google Earth works. Mining the digital map for visual errors the artist makes photographic documents of these distended topographies. Removed from the ether of the web, printed, framed and presented, these fictional photographs read as facts of events (the glitches) and place (the sites they are intended to map). Taken as a whole, the exhibition presents a thorough introduction to Kenny’s lexicon of beautifully skewed realities.
Matt Kenny (born 1979) earned a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Karma and Derek Eller Gallery and 55 Gansevoort in New York.