NYAB Event - Gavin Kenyon "Wounds"

Gavin Kenyon "Wounds"

Ramiken Crucible

This event has ended.

"Wounds" is a selection of Kenyon’s cast-iron anthropomorphic sculptures of axes. His work reflects on the motivations and ethical complexities inherent in the violence of the human body. Mixing the use of tools with a painterly sense of flesh and bone, Kenyon’s work creates a sense of perversity and repulsion: an obese form given over to the consumption of everything around it, distended and encroaching; an appendage driven to injure itself; a broken limb, splintered insides exposed. Produced in cast-iron, these works are as physically heavy as they are comically grotesque.

Inimitable and inaccessible, Kenyon’s work occupies its own genre of surreal objecthood. The disgusting, pulpy prop-house wounds from the films of David Cronenberg, the ragged edges of human interaction surveyed in William T. Vollman’s epic treatise Rising Up and Rising Down, and the experience of contradiction implicit in the early soft sculptures of Claes Oldenburg are some of the points in a constellation of ideas that Kenyon draws from; however, the work is generated specifically from Kenyon’s life experiences and personal fascinations. His obsession with bladed tools bleeds into the work itself; the instruments of his practice are the focus, providing a mirror analogue to the contemplation of the self - or a meditation on flesh. Kenyon’s sculptures sit in this zone between human and object like primitive Transformers, implying a violent instinct, animated through ancient technology.

Gavin Kenyon was born in Binghamton, New York in 1980. He received a BFA from Syracuse University and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts. This is his second solo show at Ramiken.