BRIAN KENNY SOLO SHOW IN NY

Brian's first NY solo show on Thursday:

Brian Kenny
Targets & Etchings
September 18 - October 30, 2008
Opening reception: Thursday, Sept. 18th, 6:00 - 8:30pm
5 + 5 Gallery, 111 Front Street, Suite 210, DUMBO, Brooklyn, NY 11201
http://www.5plus5gallery.com

Followed by an afterparty at Home Sweet Home with a special
performance by Black Peter at 9pm:
Home Sweet Home, 131 Chrystie Street, NY, NY 10002

The show features a new series of large-scale drawings done on American police shooting targets. The drawings, using the street-tested mediums of sharpies, paint-markers, spray paint & tape, are layered over various images of gun and knife-wielding paper criminals.

These targets act as background and catalyst for Brian’s rabid layering of line, text and figuration. The imagery explore and deconstruct the world of sports, the military, and hip hop cultures. Bling and guns. Wrestlers and pimps. Soldiers and sneakers. All & more are depicted in frenetic, obsessive image-making. The drawings often combine text that evolves out of the imagery oscillating between autobiography & the absurd.

A number of the targets were done collaboratively with fellow artists,Slava Mogutin, Gio Black Peter, Christophe Chemin, Sebastiano Mauri, Jason Ferrar, Desi Santiago and Christophe Hamadie-Pierson. The drawings work boldly as part autobiography, and part social response, a firing back, to the cultural fixations of sex, violence, politics and cyber media.

Accompanying this show Brian is presenting a book of eleven etchings with poetry entitled, Hatha Yoga for Ghetto Boys and Animals. Achieving a child-like ethos, the book combines three highly distinct subjects: yoga, animals & hip-hop.

More on Brian Kenny:
Born 1982 in Heidelburg, Germany, on an American military base. While growing up he traveled extensively with his family. As a teenager, he was a competitive gymnast. He went to Oberlin Conservatory on a opera scholarship. Brian works across drawing, painting, sculpture, text, sound, video and blogging. In 2004 he moved to New York where he began collaborating with Slava Mogutin under the name SUPERM. They are responsible for site-specific, multimedia gallery and museum shows in New York, Los Angeles, Berlin, London, Moscow, Oslo, Bergen and León, Spain.