KEVIN MCNAMEE-TWEED – TABLEAUX VIVANT
2020-08-10Tableaux Vivant is a solo exhibition by Kevin McNamee-Tweed which features a selection of new ceramic paintings which are his largest and most complicated works to date. Each shows a salon-like interior with a myriad of disparate images. In one of the works, TXT, all of these images nicely coexist: an active volcano, a cover of the fictional Iowa Review, a spider hanging from its web, a round mammal standing on its hind legs, a hexagonal trade sign with a leaf pattern, an ad with contorted fingers and the word “DONT,” a houseboat at sea with a palm tree at the edge of land, a seesaw with a four-headed person on one end and three-headed person at the other, a sculpture of a trumpet-blowing figure riding a rooster, a headless pegasus with a large “P” where it’s head would be, a pollywog in an enclosed glass sphere with a tailed frog just outside the glass. In his essay on the artist in the new monograph, Ceramic Paintings, Andrew Berardini writes, “This is a world of dreams and memories that erupt into pictures, they are signs of the new flowers and new stars sprinkling over the fields and skies of the fleeting, empty outer world. A sign of what is and what was and had been and can be and it is only ever a picture away.”
Opposite – Back from Gary’s, 2020
Exhibition runs through to August 29th, 2020
Steve Turner
6830 Santa Monica Blvd.
CA 90038
Los Angeles