Andrew Kearney - TITLE: UNKNOWN

September 18, 2007

September 2007   For this exhibit, Andrew Kearney has created an installation that examines the sense of distortion one experiences in a world under surveillance. Issues of personal history, identity and sexuality are examined through the metamorphosed object: enormous, beautifully lacquered security camera pans the room; aerosol cans are made of bone china, a photograph of a giant conifer turns out on closer inspection to be a cell phone mast. Kearney’s objects inhabit a space between disciplines and their intersections. Shifts in scale and material force the viewer to re-examine the boundaries between themselves and the work – to question whether they are participant or audience, viewer or viewed, prisoner or guard. The show further develops the artist’s ongoing interest in everyday interactions and conflicts with “man-made” objects and human alterations of environment.

Andrew Kearney, a mixed media installation artist, was born in Limerick, Ireland in 1961. He studied Fine Art at the Limerick College of Art and Design, and then went on to Chelsea College of Art and Design where he obtained an MA in sculpture. He won the Barclays Young Artist award in the Serpentine gallery London in 1992. The same year he was awarded a fellowship in the PS1 studios of contemporary art in New York. He moved back to London in 1993 where he developed an installation for the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin. The following year he developed other installations for the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, the Camden Arts Centre, London and the Ottawa Art Gallery, Ontario Canada. Site specific work led to collaborative architecture and public art projects, including Heathrow’s terminal 1 pier 4A “architect Nicholas Grimshaw” and Public Art Development Trust, also Glen Howell architects “Courtyard Project” involving South Thames College, London and the Public Arts Commission Agency. He completed two large installation projects in Ireland in 2001 and in 2004 he returned from his second residence at Banff Centre for the Arts in Canada. He is currently doing a three year fellowship in Middlesex University funded by the AHRC.