David Kearns “Futures & Pasts”

Songs For Presidents

[Image: David Kearns "Futures & Pasts" (2017) Acrylic on paper, 51 x 53 in.]

This event has ended.

The dog, a creature of habit, likes to take the same path whenever possible. The walk is usually at the same time of morning, so the light shifts slightly day to day. Occasionally, curious offerings can be found at the bases of certain trees. I look carefully, and notes are taken by a various means. Decay, accumulation, and the ritual of transformation. The rotten trunk of a tree, still standing, its hollows filled with a stash for winter, also hosting unseen miles of mycelium: the necessary invisible background structure, from which, under the right conditions, coveted edible mushrooms appear, fleetingly. There is a porthole window through the tree, also, framing the sloping woods beyond.
FUTURES & PASTS: Time travel is real. - David Kearns.

Songs for Presidents presents David Kearns: FUTURES & PASTS, his third solo show in NYC. Kearns ebullient large narrative paintings are rich in discovery, crowded with characters and objects that blur the line between junkyard and pastoral wooded glen. Signposts cluster on poles, made of incomprehensible shapes and pointing the way within this universe of sentient fungi, watchful ducks, dwarf trees and body parts, in recognition that to create means navigating a landscape strewn with objects from the past.

Wry notes, paintings on shelves within paintings, and flattening depth of field like soil layers, Kearns reminds the viewer to take a step back and not be overly serious, pointing out that art is an endeavor made by a person and hung on a wall. All made in the last three years, the large narrative paintings on paper were made in several stages as the sculptural works developed alongside as a natural process or outer growth. Working with only several pigment colors, Kearns builds color in an optical manner with glazing and interference patterns creating the unique and idiosycratic palette

David Kearns was born in 1975 in NYC, and has spent his life drawing as a means of getting from here to there. After spending a dozen years as a hermit in Vermont, Kearns has lived and worked in Richmond Hill, Queens, since 2011.

In addition to solo shows in Santa Fe and NYC, Kearns has shown work widely in Vermont, and has been featured in regional triennial surveys at the Queens Museum and the Brattleboro Museum. Kearns’ most recent solo show in NYC was at the artist-run space This Friday or Next Friday in 2015.
Kearns has self-published a number of sketchbook zines, and his drawings have been featured in the arts journal Paper Monument, and in publications by n+1 and Verso books. His writing appeared in the first issue of Paper Monument (2007), as well as its book on art school, Draw It With Your Eyes Closed (2012). His ongoing sound collaboration Three Mystic Dwarves was included in a 2009 group show at Frederich Petzl gallery.