Cosmic Rifts: Paintings by Kenneth Hall
on view May 9-July 6, 2008 in the 2nd floor gallery
ARTIST STATEMENT BY KENNETH HALL
The act of painting for me is both playful and subversive. I construct liquid spaces that are subject to ruptures and abrupt shifts in scale. Wormholes or portals are forms that I have “borrowed�? from quantum physics based on their nature as passageways between parallel universes. For me they are tears in the fabric of reality or violent intrusions of the heavens into the earthly realm. Yet there is a tinge of irony in my use of wormholes, as they have never been seen.
The wormhole represents a mysterious event; something unstable in the atmosphere. It puts the viewer in a place where they can temporarily suspend reality and enter a world that is more mysterious and dreamlike. Benign objects like flowers, mushrooms, and children’s toys take on a multi-referential quality, alluding to sexuality or more disturbing themes like wartime destruction. Narratives are implied by the relationships between objects and their surrounding spaces, but a clear story becomes difficult to discern. At this point the viewer is dislocated. Ideally, they will sense that the imagery functions as an analog to larger themes like relational conflict, tragedy, and the frailty of human life.
Painting is a richly sensual activity as well as a powerful mode of communicating with the viewer. It is a process that continuously holds in tension illusion (optical mode; an appeal to the eyes) and material substance or presence (tactile mode; an appeal to the sense of touch). My goal is to create an empathetic response with the viewer in terms of both the imagery within the painting and the physical presence of the work as an object — with its own sense of “gravity�?. I am setting up conditions for a certain kind of experience, playing with imagery to create perceptual shifts and ambiguities that subvert the viewer’s sense of stability – if only for a moment – in the alternate reality of the image. I consider painting to be a catalyst for questioning the nature of being human; of having skin.
