Kenny Cole
“Flood” was generated, for me, through a random Yahoo News item that caught my attention. The article was about the vanishing Moken Sea Nomads of Thailand/Myanmar.
A quality that conventional art possesses is its concreteness. The magic of our times is that electronic communication allows for unlimited inter-connectivity. The tragedy is the loss of concrete action and experience engendered by the virtual world. By transferring the content of the virtual world onto the convention of a traditional art form, I find I can illuminate through concreteness, scale and pictorial relationships qualities that are unattainable through virtual experiences. Underlying our inter-connectivity is a nascent morality – what do we say? What do we do? The story of Noah seemed a fitting starting point to begin weaving a secondary text into the thirty thousand word comment section of a news story about an ancient race of sea dwellers on the verge of extinction. Ultimately this piece asks the question: “Are we in control of humanity and the earth?” Both texts anguish over the fate of humanity and consequently both texts include words like “destruction” and “earth”.
My desire was to create a piece whose experience has multiple facets all manifested through concrete, handmade forms. Thus scattered in and around the grid of framed drawings were piles of washed up dummy smart phones. This installation is essentially designed to overwhelm and suggest multitude. Each iteration of “Flood” reflects the space it finds itself in and can be installed in tight, loose or erratic grids that can be floor to ceiling, with piles and eddies of red and white dummy smart phones stacked, scattered or strategically arranged throughout. “Flood” is, at its core, about Paradise Lost, which is the quintessential myth of humanity.
For more information about the artist, please visit his website.