HALSEY MCKAY GALLERY

For my second exhibition with Halsey McKay Gallery, I am presenting paintings and sculptures made over the past 13 months. They are painting and sculpture in the loosest of terms, in that they are viewed on armatures (stretchers and pedestals) that are specific to each medium, yet they swap attributes and incorporate a range of gestures from photography, printmaking and performance. The narrative inherited from a series of performance-produced exhibitions, including my first show with Halsey McKay (Off Season, 2018) provide a fictional lattice which my work continues to proliferate upon.

That metaphorical lattice is a structure upon which the most basic inevitabilities of existence—dressing, eating, touching, sharing, working, growing, deteriorating—are turned into artifice.  This is a conversion where we become our own depiction. In a culture saturated in images, in a climate where we are expected to proliferate our physical selves endlessly (through our labor and images of the self), our consciousness experiences a scattering, or stuttering.  By projecting the self in perpetuity, we become dissociated from ourselves.  We become purveyors of rumors—we trade in shadows.

The works for this show are made using inkjet transfer on canvas, plaster, and Aqua-resin, but then are subjected to various violations, prosthetic patches and restorative over-painting. They are reconfigured until they feel as if they had accumulated into their composition without coercion. They exist in a material reality that is unburdened by truth, and yet their motifs are derived from the most basic and immediately tactile substances: my body, my wife’s body, our clothing, our food, our glassware, our houseplants, our apartment floor, plants and flowers pilfered from public local parks and traffic medians, plumbing pipe and electrical conduit, tools and construction compounds, and empty disinfectant containers.  They form a trellis suspended with overgrown and clone bits of the past year. They are sponges that have absorbed beyond saturation and are oozing back evidence of what they’ve mopped up. Their compressed activity bursts from within and casts wide: plumbing erupting from a shredded skeleton T-shirt; my wife’s arms circling her dress, hands clutching dried poppies and wheat; electical conduit peeling out from a vintage cardigan; stacks of Drano bottles, Meyer’s Clean Day refills, and disinfectant wipes; plants and flowers crawling over and out of containers, raincoats and copper pipes; our apartment floorboards propped into an impossible and unspooling loop.

-David Kennedy Cutler

March, 2021, Brooklyn, NY

David Kennedy Cutler (b. 1979, Sandgate, VT ) received a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 2001. In the winter of 2018, he completed a live-streamed two-months solo show and residency at Halsey McKay Gallery in East Hampton, NY. Other solo exhibitions have been with at Derek Eller Gallery, New York; the Center for Contemporary Arts, Estonia in partnership with Art in General. He has recently been included in exhibitions at Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York; Cooley Gallery at Reed University, Portland, OR; The Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College, Clinton, NY; Locust Projects, Miami, FL; Lyles and King, New York, NY; and the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center, Philadelphia, PA. He is represented by Derek Eller Gallery in New York.