PRESS RELEASE

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Marcus Kenney: "Midnight in America"

April 17 - May 24, 2008
Opening Reception: Thursday, April 17, 6 to 9 pm

Marcia Wood Gallery will host a solo exhibition by Marcus Kenney entitled Midnight in America. Since Kenney’s inaugural launch with Marcia Wood Gallery in 2004 his signature mixed media collage works have become widely recognized. In 2007 alone Kenney has enjoyed a significant one man exhibition at the Telfair Museum in Savannah, accompanied by an in depth monograph, solo exhibitions at galleries in New York, Boston and New Orleans and exhibited at international art fairs in London and Miami. Since 2004 Kenney has also had a solo exhibition at the Columbus Museum, Columbus, GA, group exhibitions including the Sun Valley Center for the Arts, Idaho, “The New Collage,” Pavel Zoubok Gallery, NY, and “South x East,” Florida Atlantic University Biennial, as well as inclusion at art fairs in New York, Chicago, Miami and Portland. Since 1996 Kenney has been included in the Georgia Triennial, a traveling exhibition highlighting a select number of Georgia artists as well as the exhibition “Georgia Seven” at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia in Atlanta and his work has been included in exhibitions in Minneapolis, St. Louis, and Montreal. Marcus Kenney’s work is in national and international public and private collections and has been reviewed by publications including Art in America, Artpapers, New York Sun, NY Arts Magazine, Connect, Atlanta Journal Constitution, New American Paintings, and The Boston Globe.

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.”