Visiting Artist Kevin Townsend
Kevin Townsend is a Boston-based interdisciplinary artist whose work revolves around temporality and the depiction of drawing time through repetitive mark-making. He received his BFA from the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design as well as his MFA in Art Practice from the School of Visual Arts. Kevin’s work has shown both nationally and internationally, including his solo show TIME/LINE at Bluffton University in Ohio, Draw to Perform 2: International Symposium on Drawing and Performance in London, Drawing International Brisbane Symposium in Australia, and Art in Odd Places in New York City. In addition to his art practice, Kevin also teaches at Massachusetts College of Art and Design and School of the Museum of Fine Arts.
Kevin recently visited Montserrat’s campus working on his newest piece Accumulated Moments, on view in the Frame 301 through April 12th. The piece took around 12 hours and three ‘acts’, or rounds, to complete. Starting with a white wall, Kevin painted the entire surface a charcoal black and began applying white fluctuating strokes, with countless boxes of chalk in hand.
His work derives from a fascination with memory, the experience of “being in time”, and how to visually represent temporality. He describes time as having “depth, breadth, currents and flows— it exists simultaneously as individual moments and as a large sprawling body. Time is a sea. Time surrounds us; we can find ourselves immersed within it or skimming across its unpredictable and turbulent surface…and is always in transition— never still. Within this fluid, phenomenological model for time, obsession emerges as a tidal force, a storm of attention.”
Kevin’s work is durational and performative in spirit, serving as a form of its own documentation. It was in 2013 that he left representational drawing and pursued durational drawing, no longer depicting an image or ‘thing’, rather having the piece be the ‘thing’ and representing nothing other than itself and the passing of time during its creation. Because of this, the work transforms into a window into the past, allowing the viewer to get a glimpse of Kevin’s process, work, energy, performance, and progression of the piece itself.The viewer can simultaneously see the marks that began the piece as well as the marks that proceeded subsequently, minutes, hours, or days afterward. In this way the audience, artist, and artwork are connected and exist in the same time.
With this emphasis and focus on time, Kevin equally values the time he spends drawing and working as meaningful and crucial as what’s perceived to be the ‘finished product’. The idea of this ‘finished product’ functions predominately as a testimony only to what came before it and went into its conception. In order to remain authentic and genuine, Kevin rarely prepares any preliminary visualizations to work off of. He explains that all his work is intuitive and instinctive, allowing for his marks for flow freely and naturally without getting weighed down by the details. Kevin decides the piece is done If he pauses and contemplates what to do next for more than a minute to ensure that it only documents the organic and unrefined moments spent presenting the making of the work.
Written & Photographed by Cameron Foxhall ‘17
areudirty
izzy806
ellievsbear
dailybridgerton
prguitarman
