Matt Kenny
Using a variety of tools to map the psychology and geography of New York City, Kenny works in three interrelated modes of practice–a series of monotype collages on panel, glitched imagery from Google Earth, and Venn diagram inspired paintings on aluminum. 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. More poetic than factual, Kenny’s sense of survey is executed with virtuosic craft.
The haze of interpretation is both a theme and a tool for the artist. Kenny’s paintings on aluminum panel speak the educational language of textbooks or motivational literature. Rendered in sign painters enamel, the 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. Kenny not only paints skewed realities, his Google Earth works mine the digital map for them. The artist makes photographic documents of representational visual errors. 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).
Kenny’s work has been …
Using a variety of tools to map the psychology and geography of New York City, Kenny works in three interrelated modes of practice–a series of monotype collages on panel, glitched imagery from Google Earth, and Venn diagram inspired paintings on aluminum. 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. More poetic than factual, Kenny’s sense of survey is executed with virtuosic craft.
The haze of interpretation is both a theme and a tool for the artist. Kenny’s paintings on aluminum panel speak the educational language of textbooks or motivational literature. Rendered in sign painters enamel, the 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. Kenny not only paints skewed realities, his Google Earth works mine the digital map for them. The artist makes photographic documents of representational visual errors. 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).
Kenny’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions in New York at Karma, Derek Eller Gallery, 55 Gansevoort, and Halsey McKay Gallery.
Courtesy of Halsey McKay Gallery
