Solo exhibition at Marcia Wood Gallery, November 18, 2010 - January 1, 2011 installation images

Marcus Kenney (b. 1972) was born and raised in rural Louisiana and currently lives and works in Savannah, GA. Marcia Wood Gallery is pleased to announce the fourth solo exhibition at the gallery by Marcus Kenney. Kenney has had solo museum exhibitions at the Jepson Center at the Telfair Museum in Savannah and the Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, GA, with upcoming one man and group exhibitions at the Masur Museum of Art, Monroe, LA and MOCA GA, Atlanta, GA, respectively. Kenney has exhibited in museums, institutions, galleries and art fairs internationally, including Israel, Paris, London,Montreal, New York, Boston, Chicago, Kansas City, St Louis and Minneapolis, Miami, and Portland, among others. and he has been Kenney has been well-received in exhibits and art fairs in Chicago, New York and Boston. Kenney was also featured in the 2004 New American Paintings Southern Edition. Earlier activity includes inclusion in the Georgia Triennial 2003 and 2002 (a traveling exhibition highlighting a select number of Georgia artists), as well as the exhibition “Georgia Seven” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Atlanta, GA, 2004, curated by Radcliffe Bailey. His bibliography includes Art in America, Oxford American, The New York Sun, The Boston Globe, Art Papers, New American Paintings, and National Public Radio, among others.

Marcus Kenney’s explosive paintings present a tumultuous clash of imagery reflecting America’s melting pot of culture and signifying issues of race, authority, colonization, consumerism, environmentalism, religion and mortality. The initial impression of child-like cartoonish playfulness dissipates as the viewer begins to translate the painting’s content, which is dispensed by the artist with equal doses of irony, acrimony, humor and compassion. In the 2007 exhibition entitled Profit & Loss, at the Sun Valley Center for the Arts, Idaho, curator Kristin Poole writes in the catalog, “Kenney’s work is loaded with dry humor and cutting commentary on the human condition… The message of wasted possibilities and ignored warnings in unmistakable.” A native of Cooter Point, Louisiana, now residing in Savannah, Georgia, Kenney creates his mixed-media collage paintings with found material such as old photographs, magazines and newspapers, grade school workbooks, cancelled checks, cigar labels, even a hand typed sermon book, and so on. This flotsam, rescued from the trash heaps of our disposable society, is then assembled into paintings that belie their rigorous composition and dense layering with an energetic urgency. The very nature of the materials utilized raises issues of loss, reclamation and memory as an underlying emotion to the dominant sense of distortion and dislocation sending the message, as the artist states, “… the warning flags are flying.” As Jerry Cullum wrote in the Atlanta Journal Constitution in 2004, “His trademark technique of turning cutesy found pictures into something chillingly revelatory is in full sway.”