Abbi Kenny
Abbi Kenny is an emerging artist and painter living and working in Boston, MA. She is an MFA candidate in painting at Boston University. She received her BFA with honors in painting and a concentration in the Theory and History of Art and Design from RISD in 2020. She participated in RISD's European Honors Program in Rome, Italy. After completing her undergraduate degree. Abbi is a recipient of the Royal Drawing School’s Dumfries House Estate drawing residency and grant near Cumnock, Scotland (2019) and the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant in painting (2022).
As I paint, I am solving a puzzle–each image and composition is a unique challenge for me to discover new ways of applying paint. My practice is an alchemical exploration of acrylic–pouring, stenciling, airbrushing, marbling, and stamping. Rather than rendering traditionally; I think of illusion as a means of recreating and mimicking objects' impressions. By clashing together distinct paint languages, I endeavor to replicate tactility and indexicality while highlighting the thingy-ness of each object. My unconventional approach to developing a painting’s surface allows for the initial impression of my paintings to be seductive, deceivingly realistic, and photographically exact, but, upon further investigation, the surfaces dissolve into their materiality. Curiosity guides me, and material exploration is one of my methods of investigation. I see my painting practice as centered on asking questions, why, how, what, and who, rather than making statements–and in doing so, I learn things. Rather than a means to an end, for me, painting is a continuous process of exploration.
In my paintings, I am interested in the histories and stories of inherited objects and ideas, such as recorded or idealized history, dreams and desires, banal objects, expectations, behaviors, and lineages located primarily in my own experience in New England. I want to explore the appearances and assumptions of what things are expected to look or be like and how these ideas mix with familial histories, cultural legacies, and economies. I am thinking about food and still lifes as a conduit for these ideas. History is my passion, alongside painting. I imagine that in another universe, I am an archeologist. But in ours, I am, instead, the historian's unexpected assistant–a painter and image-maker. By documenting my perspective as a painter and wannabe culinary archaeologist, I am a mix of a contemporary painter, art historian, and still life master.
