Middlemarch: An Art Exhibition by Simone Kearney

You are invited to attend the opening of Middlemarch,

a January exhibition of art by Simone Kearney.

Tuesday, January 21st, 7 pm

Berl's Poetry Shop

126A Front Street

DUMBO, Brooklyn

“Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self.”
-- “Middlemarch” by George Eliot


“Middlemarch” is a January 2014 exhibition at Berl’s Poetry Shop in Dumbo, Brooklyn featuring a series of paintings and drawings by poet/artist Simone Kearney. The title of the show pays homage to George Eliot’s novel, which Kearney listened to on audio CD in her studio during the construction and revision of the works in this show.

In her drawings, Kearney examines convergence points where lines evoke psychic states or echo parts of the body such as hair, muscle fibers and scar tissue. Incredibly controlled, these works of ink on paper suggest the tension and release in being cooped up, trapped, freed—like a 19th century writer—to one’s private room. Her works detail what inevitable hiccups and glitches might derail a single penstroke: following its trusted impulse, it starts to replicate confusedly or entirely fall away.

In Kearney’s paintings, the focus shifts from the syntax of the line to the vocabulary of contour and application, reaching to the breaking point of her materials: its stretchiness, buckling, pudgy markings. Made during Kearney’s residency at the Josef Albers Foundation in Bethany this past summer, the paintings are inspired in part by Anni Albers’ weavings and Albers’ famed meditations on color. The canvas is worked and overworked, scrubbed and erased, and reconstructed until the oils became clotted and contaminated on the site of their own previous extinction. Recycling several old canvases for each piece, these new works became ghostly transparent in their endless process of accretion, where the bulk, waste, or resilience of what’s underneath—the painting’s history—is tested by sight and memory. Like her drawings, these paintings attack the ways in which an image inhabits silence, absences which in turn are made legible or eventually forgotten by the artist’s next choice. Collectively, the surfaces ritualize and poke holes through our myths of decipherability, where borderstatter into substance, and each mark is made beside the point by subsequent accidents in emphasis. Finally, the painter’s most visible choices are seen submerging behind a scrim of memory that includes failure, doubt, improvisation, accident and endless surprise.