Kenny Cole
Monroe, ME
Much of my painting and installations take on an activist perspective in order to begin identifying and defining emerging moral calculi.
MessageCollection: "The Shroud Cycle: Who is My Avatar"
Experimenting with creating inkblots on rice paper I discovered, after inadvertently blotting two sheets at once, a way of creating modules I could arrange, side-by-side, into symmetrical compositions. I soon began to fold larger sheets, blot them and then arrange them unfolded as larger groupings. Within these patterned fields I painted the image of a “jacked” Jesus Christ. The combination of this motif and the mirrored staining shortly brought to my mind an association with the Shroud of Turin, the well-known Christian relic, which, having been stored as a folded fabric for hundreds of years, had a similar stain patterning. The Shroud Cycle then is an aesthetic search or process within an associative context.
For the Shroud Cycle I would create themed groupings of "ink blot" based pieces. Each group would fit an exhibition venue. “Who is My Avatar?” at the Cyr Gallery of the Bangor Public Library, would explore vertical compositions of primary figures. “Let There Be War” at Zoot Coffee would include wide panoramic arrangements of horizontally reflected patterns that suggest the theater of battle. “Why Are We Here?” at Cynthia Winings Gallery's cathedral-like second floor barn space would consist of a hanging Jacob’s Ladder contraption whose design would be loosely proportionate to the Shroud of Turin, which consists of one long fabric panel that originally shrouded a body from toe to head, continuous over the top of the head and back down behind the body, ending at the body’s heels. “O Earth” at the Sohns Gallery would consider the suggestion of the earth as a final resting place or a current repository for an endless array of human made structures or waste products.
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