Urban Erasures
In her new paintings Principal Lecturer Alex Kennedy explores the action of covering up graffiti.
Alexandra Kennedy’s practice is located within a context which engages with the zero gesture in painting and draws on strategies of non-objective, minimalist and conceptual art. Most recently her research has deployed ‘found’ gestures from sites of urban erasure, specifically the overpainting of graffiti within the urban environment, the social space of the city. These gestures are re-materialised as a formal device through a process of cataloguing based visually on the grid (thereby invoking a different type of space, the mental space of the cartographer).
Alex Kennedy's "Urban Erasures" collection forms part of the exhibition suite 20/21: part 2, at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery until 18 July. Curator Lucy Hammonds states:
“Since the advent of modernism, the structural and conceptual framework of the grid has held an important position within non-objective painting. In this series, Kennedy has inverted the grid into a set of colour fields – each work drawing from a found composition that has been identified within the constraints of colour mixing charts. As with sites of erased graffiti, the colour chart is a model that has its own connections to the processes and histories of painting.”