CHRIS KENNY - Artist
Utopia 2014
Six part construction made with discarded landscape paintings
We at the Laboratory are confirmed word lovers, paper lovers, construction lovers, collectors of all ephemera and precious treasures. For this reason, there is rarely anything more delicious than the work of Chris Kenny who combines all our love affairs.
His work is best summed up in a recent essay by Gabriel Coxhead as ‘witty, severe, paradoxical things, appearing at once rational and also deeply surreal’. We couldn't agree more. Coxhead points out, ‘it’s hard to think of anything more ephemeral, or more wonderful, than what Kenny collects – yet, at the same time, more utterly commonplace: words, snippets of sentences and odd turns of phrase, shapes lifted from maps and scientific diagrams – in short, different kinds of representation, the sort of quotidian signs and symbols that codify and communicate meaning.’
Turning the every day into reflective moments of tremendous depth, wit and always with a provocative wink to our modern cultural conundrums.
Cubist Book (Reincarnation) 2013
Mixed media construction with hand-made book