IMPROBABILITIES

This book is a companion to an exhibit of over 30 drawings by visual artist Kenny Cole at Chase's Daily in Belfast, Maine during the months of June and July 2009. Here is an excerpt from the book's essay written by Steve Buckley:

"With these new Word Drawings the words and letters themselves assume an objecthood in their careful delineation as independent enigmatic objects in service with illustrative and abstract visual elements to convey Cole’s larger preoccupations.

The words alternately communicate energy and excitement, calm, and a confusion in need of untangled deciphering portrayed in upside down, backwards, letters and words. Some words are arbitrarily dissected by disconnected individual letters. Some words are built of variously sized and colored letters. Some passages are written in a continuous field with no space breaks between words. Some letters form different words arranged in a vaguely conventional stacked format of sentences are selectively regrouped by a loosely encircling lasso-like line to hint at possible hidden meanings. Is this by chance or (sinister) purposeful intention?

Here as in his other works, Cole continues to develop and hone his rich and varied visual vocabulary through a repetition and recombination of selected motifs into a personal iconography in the service of recurrent themes.

Some of these motifs that appear here in IMPROBABILITIES are the disembodied extended hands and arms of out of view suited authorities or also as the unseen hands of God, mysterious and foreboding opaque clouds where unseen forces remain hidden, draped banners and bunting implying some sense of staging, implicitly energetic directionally flowing and/or irradiating typography, text, and images broadcasting to the world, lattice-like webs, various scientific imagery whether it be explanatory technical diagrams or illustrated lab equipment, military machinery, transportation, and weaponry, and as a kind of overall binder, the 40’s, 50’s, and 60’s retro-styled illustrative depictions of historical characters. There is an essential and distinctly American quality about Cole’s work."