Less Like an Object and More Like the Weather
Neuebauer Collegium, Chicago, IL
02.17.2022 – 04.10.2022
Arnold J. Kemp (b. 1968) is a Chicago-based American artist whose work ranges across an array of media including installation art and sculpture, painting and photography, and performance and poetry. Over the years, Kemp has sought to articulate his long-standing interest in challenging and interrogating the politics of “othering” so central to the imperial project of Western enlightenment. He has pursued this interest through a variety of forms and motifs, among which the mask stands out as the artist’s most persistent iconographic concern. Masks have occupied Kemp’s imagination for close to three decades, and they are doubly present in the project developed for the Neubauer Collegium, the centerpiece of which is a sprawling installation consisting of hundreds of hand-sculpted ceramic objects, paired with two large-scale photographs of the artist’s hand eerily animating a flaccid Fred Flintstone mask: “speech acts” that are exquisitely articulate in their wordlessness.
Curated by Dieter Roelstraete
