Arnold Joseph Kemp, the poetry of garbage
Headless, 2015.
About:
The work attempts to find the body. The objects on view are devices for a body that will navigate today’s and tomorrow’s increasingly mechanistic, efficient and brutal existences, in order to find the poetry of garbage, pesticides, ghosts, and cyber, astral and biological pollution. That is our world, isn’t it?
Some time in the 1990s, a study appeared about nostalgias elicited by aromas. It was determined that in the USA – for those born during the 1930s and 1940s – the strongest scent references were pine, roses, hot chocolate, just-baked bread and the ocean breeze. For those born during the 1960s, the smells were smoke, hairspray, nail polish, burnt rubber and old socks. HEADLESS, poised against the myriad senses and identities possible in our globalized situation, approaches the spirit of transgressing the LIMITS OF THE BODY. That feeling of suffocating? For how many years have we felt that feeling and yet we continue to try to live gorgeously with constant irritation? We wonder if this is possible.
March, 2015.
Headless, 2015.
Arnold Joseph Kemp lives and works in Richmond, Virginia and has shown at the Studio Museum in Harlem, The Berkeley Art Museum, The Santa Monica Museum of Art, The Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, The Wattis Institute, Disjecta, Rocks Box Fine Art, PDX Contemporary and the Luggage Store/509 Cultural Center. He has done performances at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California College of the Arts, and at The Banff Centre. His last solo show in New York was held at Debs & Co. and his work was included in the inaugural exhibition at Koenig & Clinton in 2013. Kemp is also a writer whose poems have appeared in Callaloo, Three Rivers Poetry Journal, Agni Review, MIRAGE #4 Period(ical), River Styx, Nocturnes, Art Journal, and Tripwire. He is a Guggenheim Fellow in Visual Arts (2012) and chairs the Department of Painting and Printmaking at Virginia Commonwealth University. (text of his ‘Headless’ exhibition in Soloway Gallery, Brooklyn)
Company
she showed me paintings
she showed me drawings
at the moment it was horrible
I had to sleep a lot in order
to gain what I had lost of my life
in the intense looking
there’s a lot that enters your body
but who cares if all I have is art
although that was not what we
were doing at the time
I can tell you one thing more
the mountain and the dessert
are images of the mind
hidden in some other place
and a moon that vaguely turns
always in print away
from my vocabulary
and in the confession also
that somewhere out there is
a human identity and a war
the previous tenant left behind
—Arnold Joseph Kemp, 2015
About 2:
Black Diamond Water, 2005.
November, 2008.
Arnold Joseph Kemp is of the generation of pacesetting artists who became known in New York through participation in the Studio Museum in Harlem’s groundbreaking Freestyle exhibition of 2001. Kemp’s work functions as an indicator of one of the varied directions artists are taking in deploying references to black culture. At the center of the presentation Kemp has placed a hauntingly, enigmatic sculpture titled WHEN WILL MY LOVE BE RIGHT that is made of objects that look found but are actually made by the artist. Accompanying this work are several of Kemp’s photographic images of “aluminums” that speak with a paradoxical coolness of the conflict between competing needs to mask and to express the self that is an aesthetic stance familiar from African art and American jazz. Kemp’s work displays a certain mastery of and irreverence toward history that allows him to move like a jazz musician who plays with the confidence to push blackness into a higher level of abstraction, to push it into silence and poetry.