OPENING | Kim Kennedy Austin + Andrew Kent

Join us Thursday, November 2nd from 7 – 10pm for the opening reception of two new shows: ‘You, Only Better’ from Kim Kennedy Austin and ‘Epiphoria’ from Andrew Kent.

The result of a recent artist residency at BAF, Kim Kennedy Austin’s new body of work ‘You, Only Better’ touches on the seemingly universal desire for self-improvement.Austin explores the subject of self-betterment through the advertisements found in Western Homes and Living magazines of the 1960s and the illustrations for an early workout manual titled Figure Fitness in Fifteen Days: Your Rx for Slenderness (1946). These sources show that far from being a new phenomenon, the breathless desire to improve oneself through quick fixes was linked to the capitalist rise of the “keeping-up-with-the-Joneses” consumerism of the economically prosperous North America of the post-WWII era.

Rendered in pencil on black paper, Andrew Kent’s painstakingly detailed seascapes flicker in and out of visibility as light catches on the reflective graphite surface. The viewer’s bobbing, back-and-forth motion that causes the image to appear and disappear is reminiscent of the ebb and flow of tidal waters, and the shifting mutability of perception itself. ‘Epiphoria’ evokes the fragility of both our inner worlds and the material one we inhabit.