In the case of some wars, winning just makes you a loser.
For artist Kirk Ke Wang, that’s true of the war he sees humans waging against our natural environment. The point hit home a few years back when Wang took his U.S.-born kids to visit his hometown, Shanghai, and witnessed them struggling to breathe the mega-city’s polluted air.
For the children of today, Wang realized, fresh air and thriving wildlife are fast becoming myths of an irretrievable past.
“The natural world has almost disappeared, particularly from China,” Wang says. “In the past, nature was a part of our life. Now it’s all industrialized.”
In response, the artist — whose work often fuses humor with a critical take on globalization — has staged a protest of sorts. Visitors to Last Meal, his immersive art installation at Salt Creek Artworks in St. Petersburg (on view through March 31), will encounter a mass suicide. Don’t worry, though. No living creatures have been harmed in the creation of Wang’s artwork. Its self-sacrificing victims are stuffed toys.
To create the installation, Wang commissioned Chinese toymakers to produce 2,000 stuffed animals — each attached to a matching, superhero cape-like blanket — based on the 26 letters of the English alphabet. A tiger represents the letter T, a rabbit the letter R and so on. In an expansive gallery at Salt Creek, 200 of the animals hang from the ceiling, suspended in rows on either side of a central space. On the floor, a round platform holds dozens of ceramic dumplings arranged in a spiral. A video of plastic dinosaurs in a landscape and a soundtrack of animal sounds complete the experience.
The premise behind Wang’s installation is that its 200 animal characters have conspired to offer humans a macabre meal — the platform of dumplings, with a heaping side of soft, fuzzy death — as a last-ditch effort to raise awareness about human-animal relations. Wang’s concerns are diverse — from humans farming animals for food to the entertainment industry anthropomorphizing wild critters into cuddly buddies.
He says the piece fuses a parent’s concern about the future of the planet, a meat-eater’s ambivalence, and a fascination with China’s global dominance. He’s planning an expanded version of Last Meal for display at a Texas art fair later this year using even more of the kamikaze stuffed animals he designed and produced, which even bear a facetiously domesticated product name: Blanky Pets.
On view concurrently with Wang’s installation at Salt Creek is Layers of Intention, an exhibition of paintings by Steven Kenny, an artist who relocated recently to downtown St. Petersburg from the suburbs of New York City. So much the better for area art lovers, since Kenny’s exhibition (his local debut) is a display of impressive talent.
His oil-on-linen paintings of male and female figures nestled into symbolically charged tableaus have a familiar quality. The Wishbone (2011) is typical of his output in that it fuses a Surrealist penchant for dreamlike narrative with technical skill reminiscent of Old Master paintings. In the image, a nude female figure faces away from the viewer, grasping a giant wishbone behind her back as six crimson cardinals attempt to take flight despite being bound to her by strings. Contemplating the canvas’s symbolic puzzle is fun — What’s the significance of the wishbone? What will happen to the figure once the wishbone snaps? — but it’s the painting’s almost flawless illusionism and soft, golden glow that make it breathtaking.
Two surprises here. Kenny says his painting chops come largely by way of self-education, though he trained as an illustrator at the august Rhode Island School of Design in the 1980s. And despite their resonance with 20th-century Surrealism, his compositions have nothing to do with dreams. Instead, Kenny regards each of the paintings, regardless of whether it features a male or female figure, as a self-portrait.
The idea offers tantalizing insight into particular paintings, like The Arrival (2012), a massive canvas that depicts a child explorer dressed in Eskimo furs on the shore of a tropical island. Newly alighted in paradise, the child looks uncertain and slightly fearful of his fate. Another work, The Fracture, painted in a slightly chillier palette reminiscent of Northern Renaissance portraiture, shows a woman with a boulder sprouting vibrant pink flowers strapped to her chest; her reddened eyes (perfectly rendered by Kenny) intimate tears, but her furrowed brow suggests resolve. It’s difficult not to identify with the humanity of such figures and by extension with the humanity of the artist.
The exhibit does contain one literal self-portrait, a small painting that mimics a 1654 work by Rembrandt — one of Kenny’s favorite artists and a clear influence on his painting. The Dutch original shows Hendrickje Stoffels, Rembrandt’s second wife by common law marriage, bathing in a stream in her white underclothes. Kenny’s impudently skillful update replaces the feminine figure with a self-portrait of the artist taking a piss.
This article appears in Mar 22-28, 2012.