Marcus Kenney has always been a collector—of images, materials, patterns, characters, and the discarded paper remnants of everyday life. In these new works, ledger sheets, canceled checks, wallpaper, illustrations, and other found materials are cut apart and recombined into densely populated worlds of his own making.
Kenney's figures inhabit places where scale and logic are wonderfully unstable. Butterflies swarm, landscapes shift abruptly, patterns collide, and characters appear absorbed in activities whose stories we can only guess at. Some gather quietly; others seem caught in the middle of something we have arrived too late to understand. The familiar becomes peculiar, sometimes slightly unhinged, and humor sits easily alongside moments of beauty and unease. There is history embedded in Kenney's materials, but he doesn't treat them reverently. He cuts them up, paints over them, rearranges them, and puts them back to work. People and objects that never belonged together acquire a new history together. The resulting images feel accumulated rather than composed according to a single narrative—built from things that have already lived one life and are now free to live another.
The title, See You Down the Line, carries time, distance, separation, and the possibility of return. “Down the line” can point backward or forward depending on how you encounter the work, while “see you” works as a leave-taking—a casual goodbye that assumes, or maybe just hopes for, another encounter. Marcus Kenney (b. 1972) was born and raised in rural Louisiana and currently lives and works in Savannah, GA. See You Down The Line is his eighth exhibition since 2004 with Marcia Wood Gallery. He earned an MFA from Savannah College of Art and Design in 1998.
Kenney has exhibited in museums, institutions, galleries and art fairs internationally, including Tel Aviv, Paris, London, Montréal, Atlanta, New York, Boston, Chicago, Kansas City, St. Louis, Minneapolis, Miami and Portland.
