Marcus Kenney "DOPE" at Florida Mining
We had the opportunity to catch up with globally recognized artist Marcus Kenny last night at the Florida Mining Gallery. Louisiana born, Marcus now hails from Savannah, Georgia, and over the past few years has found himself making a transition from mostly collage and paper oriented work to working with 3D objects and art created using repurposed found objects.
He has a friend who owns a barbecue restaurant and one day he noticed a jar in the restaurant full of twist ties. You know, the little metal twist band you find on sandwich bags. He asked his friend to save the ties for him and a year later he had roughly ten thousand of them, so he tied them onto a fishing net to create the centerpiece for his exhibit.
Fishing seems to be an integral theme in his work, fishing being a large part of his family history in Louisiana. Take this piece, for instance, titled “ Put your hand over the side of the boat ” after Kate Bush (A Coral Room) lyrics , it features both painted as well as actual fishing net buoys, some of which are bespeckled with sequins.
Kenny admitted that working in repurposed or found objects has bootstrapped a notion for people offering him items they feel he could use for art, but 90% of it he throws away remarking that “It’s the thought that counts”. Although he was kind enough to walk us through a few of his pieces and process, he ended the Q&A by stating that he doesn’t particularly care to talk about his work and his process, preferring instead to leave it to the viewer to interpret the work on their own and formulate their own back story for each piece.
In remembering an instance where his children remarked about objects he pulled from the side of the road that it was trash he laughed and said “I get the final say on what’s trash around here”. When we asked how much of the work is found objects and how much was store bought he said “It’s almost all basically trash”.