Press Release - "Drawings and Pictures and Time" by Jordy Kerwick
Jordy Kerwick
”A Drawing #7”
Marker and ink on paper
21.5 x 14.5 inches
Black Frame
info@part2gallery.com
pt. 2:
Drawings and Pictures and Time
Jordy Kerwick
Opening - January 9, 2021
Showing Through - Friday, February 5, 2020
Schedule a private viewing
info@part2gallery.com
pt. 2 Gallery is pleased to present Drawings and Pictures and Time, a solo exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by the France-based Australian artist Jordy Kerwick. Concentrated on Kerwick’s small-format drawings, the exhibition depicts Kerwick’s vast imagination and evolving subject matter. Created during the ever-lengthening Covid-19 pandemic, these drawings lay the groundwork for Kerwick’s latest paintings, depicting a new lexicon of animal busts, the human form in varying poses, and mythical, and imagined entities.
A shift in reality calls for a shift in language - in Kerwick’s case, visual language. The chaos of a world reacting to crisis is imminent in Kerwick’s new drawings and paintings, a sharp turn from his tranquil explorations of domestic scenes and abstraction. Ironically, it took a stay at home order to push Kerwick’s beyond the scenes of flower pots and stacked books. With the imposition of a nonstop stay at home order, the peaceful retreat of home manifests not as a place of comfort, but of confinement. When his own world was reduced to a farmhouse in the south of France where he draws and paints, Kerwick’s imagination extended beyond his daily reality. The fantastical elements of his latest work reveal a desire for greater freedom that we can all hope to achieve looking forward.
Kerwick’s drawings fit into the larger social reaction to a tumultuous year - one rife with ravishing wildfires, a global pandemic, limited travel, killer hornets, political instability, and more. The repetitive and cyclical nature of these crises has led many on social media to joke that “aliens are up next” - or that every month holds a new spectacle beyond our imagination. Unicorns, werewolves, and cobras hardly seem out of place in a world where reality surpasses our imaginations.
Jordy Kerwick
”A Drawing #1”
Marker and ink on paper
21.5 x 14.5 inches
Black Frame
info@part2gallery.com
Many of Kerwick’s drawings address the dualities and dichotomies that follow us - heaven and hell, good and bad, primal and civilized, large and small, the draining and the grounding, and life and death. Between the manic figures, predatory creatures turned home decor and self-aware annotations, Kerwick’s search for equilibrium becomes apparent. A drawing with no image lists a number of subjects to draw from “remote to moderate interest” while another declares “fuck it, they’re just things.” How does a painter cope with global disaster with only a sketchbook in hand? In a quixotic linguistic play, the anglophone artist’s world itself was turned upside, from Australia where the term still life contains life, while the French nature mort contains the other end of the duality.
While predominantly untitled, many annotations border many of the Kerwick’s drawings. These thoughts are phrases make apartment the artist’s concentration on the lifecycle - how the shadow of the death emerges from the embrace of the life. A drawing of a two-headed cobra is marked “I’ll miss you when I’m gone.” Death itself is less concerning than its consequences - the foreboding sense of loss and separation that it carries. Nearly a year after the initial stay-at-home order, the house has become a representation of warmth, love and confort. Even many of the fanstical elements become objects of domesticity. Cobras take the form of lamps, tigers of rugs.
This embrace in family is mirrored in two statement “We searched & searched & searched for home, only to find it in each other, and that was enough” and “We lived on top of each other and it was chaos and it was good and we were happy”. In spite of all the mania of the world, and the frantic imagination that accompanies an uncertain retail, Kerwick has forged through the chaos, and found solace and joy in his family.
Jordy Kerwick
”A Drawing #3”
Marker and ink on paper
14.5 x 21.5 inches
Black Frame
info@part2gallery.com