Kevin Claiborne ’21 in Solo Show at Sean Horton (Presents)
Until April 8, 2023, Visual Arts Alumni Kevin Claiborne ’21 is exhibiting 14 works on wood panels at Sean Horton (Presents) gallery in New York City. Service? (18 x 14 in., 2023), the first acrylic and ink on wood panel piece one encounters in Family Business, is relatively small and difficult to decipher. The collaged image consists of an armed services emblem on the side of a figure’s sleeve. In the bottom-third of the image, a faint pair of eyes emerges, but one cannot be sure if they are human or animal, and if animal, which one. The tedious work involved in scanning the gray-black piece for clues, one realizes, serves as a brilliant durational-threshold for an exhibition concerned with time, memory, and passage.
Hanging to the right of Service? is Brotherhood? (24 x 30 in., acrylic and ink on wood panel, 2023). Here, the viewer is immediately granted access into the world shared by two brothers: they are each in a high chair, legs dangling, eyes attuned to the photographer, a balloon raised to each of their mouths. In the upper right hand corner, a turquoise blue splotch of paint suggests a cloud overfilled with moisture: at some point, the cloud dripped and spilled onto the photo below.
The use of paint, wood grain, and silkscreen printing to disrupt the promise of coherence that a photograph presents is precisely the point. However, it is notable that in Claiborne’s hands, the considered techniques involved in making an image into art does not overtake the people the work concerns itself with—a delicate balance that is difficult to pull off.
The pieces in Family Business invite a viewer to be with and wonder about these people in these images. The invitation feels earnest yet complicated. No one face is fully visible. In many of the works, the paint scorches the image, creating an effect similar to the experience of memories themselves: freeze frames that turn intelligible if you grasp too eagerly or stand too close.
Nonetheless, each of the images beckons you towards it. Some, like Happiness? (20 x 16 in., acrylic and ink on wood panel, 2023), evoke the feeling of looking through the threads of a loom. Others, such as Lonely? (30 x 30in., acrylic and ink on wood panel, 2023), bear a series of lines: “Even my dreams have hesitations / Even my shadow is lonely / Swing like a pendulum / Feeling free but trapped / Feeling free but trapped / Feeling free but trapped / Swing like a pendulum / Even my shadow is lonely / Even my dreams have hesitations.” To the left of this text, in Lonely?, is a recognizable face, for it seems to be one of the brothers from the high chair in Brotherhood?, or, perhaps the baby cradled in the man’s arms in Responsibility? (30 x 30in., acrylic and ink on wood panel, 2023), that is hanging a few feet down, on the next wall.
Hosted inside the rooms of Sean Horton (Presents), with its cascading vaulted ceiling and exposed brick walls, Family Business takes on the shape and feeling of a time vault, one that viewers are granted a privileged peek into.
Kevin Claiborne is a multidisciplinary conceptual artist whose work examines intersections of identity, social environment, & mental health within the Black American experience. Moving between collage, silkscreen, photography, painting, and sculpture, while frequently using language as material, Claiborne is interested in finding new ways to look at history and its connection to the present. Claiborne holds a B.S. in Mathematics from the historically Black college North Carolina Central University (2012), an M.S. in Higher Education from Syracuse University (2016), and an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University (2021).