By Eddie Fritts Tomaselli 14 OCT 23
The first thing one may notice about Kerry Downey’s recent exhibition at Soloway Gallery, entitled Wormholes, are the colors. Each work on paper revels in a particular hue, usually a vibrant flavor, which gives the impression of an abundance of play. The work that makes up Wormholes is replete with experimentation and textural explosions—which in turn create a kind of visual hijinks—however there is also no shortage of painstaking detail imbued into the many different layers that make up each
piece.
“With an insatiable hunger, I take a lot in and shit a lot out. Pages pile upon pages of doodling, writing and research. Prolifacay is an antidote to hole-iness. I’m an earthworm, faith-noodling underground,” writes Downey. Just as the earthworm is resourceful and scrappy, so is Downey when creating their monotypes. Scribbled upon the paper, even the linework reminds the viewer of tunnels and festering emotions below the surface.
The other components of their work: under-the-microscope amoeba-esque shapes in the foreground, dots and mixed scratches in the background, only reinforce a kind of biological intentionality. In the case of Wormholes, that’s literal as well—Downey has repurposed aspects of earlier drawings and prints directly into these new pieces. There is no waste of materials, just as there’s none in the natural
world.
Soloway and the curator for this particular show—the artist Orli Swergold—maximize the gallery’s
small space in ways that let you appreciate Downey’s multidisciplinary approach. The first room, which is open and full of natural light, lets you appreciate the size and detail of Kerry’s larger works. As you make your way toward the back, you’ll soon enter a smaller-but-still-open room that features a TV screen playing a video installation (also titled Wormholes). The film, made up of earlier videos (2007-2017) produced by Downey, shows the artist newly collaged into various scenes. They describe it as a “queer embodiment as visceral and entropic, where breakdown is also breakthrough.”
While getting lost in Downey’s paintings and watching Wormholes, I started to feel like I was
burrowing deeper into their subconcious. The exhibition works perfectly as is, but if I were to offer a suggestion, it would be to construct a giant wormhole that leads to a subterranean gallery showing off the titular exhibition.
Now that would be spot on.
WORM HOLES is up through October 15th at Soloway Gallery at 348 S 4th St.
Brooklyn, NY, 11211.
thecolorhour.com 