My work addresses the relationship between physical space, architecture and the painted image. Currently, I am employing photographic material as a ground on which to build paintings. The nature photographs act as a location, a point of identification or projection. The physical paint acts as a screen over the photographs compressing the space and bringing two methods of viewing together on the surface as a means to explore new territories of representation and reception in my work. Looking through one element to another and back has become a consistent visual space in the work. I am interested in the sense of loss the photographs instill as a moment past alongside the immediacy of the abstracted architectural proposal. It is a relationship between what is actual and what is imagined. The use of nature photographs softened by the act of blowing them up from off-set lithography proposes an already mediated relation to that which is deemed more authentic than the non-objective image. I am interested in the tension, the tenuous moment between these modes and the incongruities they produce.
Kevin Appel
Appel holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Parsons School of Design and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of California, Los Angeles. He has had recent solo exhibitions at Ameringer McEnery Yohe gallery in New York and Christopher Grimes Gallery in Santa Monica, California. His work is in the permanent collections of the Walker Art Center, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others.
Website
http://kevinappelstudio.com
