Kevin Brady: Recent Work

I call these works constructed paintings. They are made from found painted boards salvaged from house and building renovation sites, curbsides and dumpsters. I select, cut, and combine parts of the boards I find, but no additional painting is involved. Except for cleaning and occasional sanding, surfaces are preserved as I found them. Following the paintings, I began to re-evaluate unresolved or "failed" drawings I had kept around the studio, to cut and reassemble these.

These working modes have enabled me to extend multiple theme-motives suggested by my own, earlier landscape painting: the poetics of construction, the language of boundaries, the condensing of form and color; the search and recovery of "artifacts" from my environment, and puzzling through these accumulated pieces to some kind of whole.

The element of play and improvisation afforded by these methods seems to me as important as the plan-and-execute approach that dominated my earlier work. As such, these present works represent a significant re-evaluation and opening up of my process. In this sense, collage and assembly seem to entail a sense of lived and ongoing experience. They recognize interruption, dislocation, and afterthought as working conditions. They invite and respond to the unplanned. They establish a site for the reception of unforeseen changes, within a general constructive tendency.

Building is a basic expression of the daily need to order one's environment. The constructive act counters the clear presence of deterioration and ruin. In some modest degree, I mean to defy time with this particular working method and "aesthetic of redemption."