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APRIL 2009 - Kim McKennamodern problems<br /><br />my current body of work is an exploration of artificiality as it relates to various types of pictorial space. these pieces were, in part, initially inspired when i revisited the film on the waterfront. i was stricken by the idea that once a viewer enters a visual context, they become willing participants in the creation of reality within that particular context. this was most evident to me in regard to the film set. many (not all) scenes in the film are shot in front of an actual ship. the remaining waterfront scenes are shot in front of a two-dimensional reproduction of a similar ship. once i entered into the space of the film, this minor rupture in continuity didn’t seem important, and perhaps it isn’t in terms of the film itself. what this does, however, is hold in tension the competing notions of what is real versus what is artificial; how these notions work together and how they compete.<br /><br /> i am primarily interested in how this type of rupture could be applied to painting. simply put, the work is a new context, a set perhaps, where these disparate players interact in ways that variously correspond and conflict and that are simultaneously real and artificial. ultimately my aim is to generate subtle discord that positions the viewer directly on the boundary between belief and disbelief, where they are aware alternately of a painting as a discrete object and as limitless space.<br /><br /> giorgio de chirico once said, “i have always had an immense aversion to open air performances. these characters in costume who gesticulate and speak under a ‘real’ sky in the middle of ‘real’ nature have always given me the impression of something as stupid as it is fake…and film directors do not want to understand either that, in a film, characters in costume cannot move in real nature, under a real sky, among real trees, near a real sea and that the older the character’s costume, the more his confrontation with real nature gives a fake impression. a character in costume needs a set of painted backdrops of skies, of mountains, of painted trees, to be able to appear in his real aspect.”<br /><br /> this theme of the relationship between reality and artificiality is not just an abstract aesthetic problem; and perhaps it is not so much a clear dialectic (the artifice in on the waterfront enhanced the real “ness” of the film experience). we live in a world where all images are aestheticized and taken up in the same manner, routinely divorced from their contexts, and are typically experienced only after being subjected to any number of intermediary forces. applied to contemporary life, the paintings are musings on image consumption and how this pathology removes us from direct experience; a numbing effect of sorts. do modern images find their genesis solely in other images? my inclusion of modernist icons ask one to consider whether it is possible, in our contemporary setting, to neutralize imagery to its formal concerns or will there always be indelible social and political connotations? <br /><br /> my work is an exploration of this idea of image construction and is an attempt to reveal, in perhaps an oblique manner, the fakery of painting. the only real context left is the context of the artwork itself.
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