BRIAN KENNY: Double Trouble: INTERPENETRATION at La Petite Mort Gallery, Ottawa Canada

August 22, 2011

Double Trouble: INTERPENETRATION at La Petite Mort Gallery, Ottawa Canada

INTERPENETRATION

Photographs and Drawings

September 2 – October 2, 2011
Vernissage: Friday, September 2th,
7–10 pm

La Petite
Mort Gallery
306 Cumberland Street
Ottawa, Ontario
Canada, K1N 7H9

Slava Mogutin is the best kind of artist – the kind who creates because he needs to, and who painstakingly develops an aesthetic to express that need. Starting out as a poet in his teenage years, he wrote beautiful, angry poems in Russian that came deep from the heart of his motherland. Later kicked out of Russia by authorities for his “exceptional cynicism” and “extreme insolence”, Mogutin ended up an exile in America and, being forced to abandon his mother tongue, switched to a purely visual art form – photography – as a creative outlet. His early photographs were more abstract, but he soon also started to experiment with portraiture and photo journalism. His work now easily and playfully vacillates between the two, but the poetry always remains. Brian Kenny, Slava’s partner in love and art, entered the picture about seven years ago. A prodigious young talent in his own right, Brian soon joined forces with Slava to become a collaborative art duo called SUPERM. This auspicious conjunction has added new dimensions to their work, including shared drawings, sculptural products, videos, and site-specific installations. While Slava and Brian both pursue their own art careers individually, SUPERM allows them to broaden their palette and produce work that synthesizes their styles and practices: a force to be reckoned with!

- Bruce LaBruce

New York-based partners-in-art Slava Mogutin and Brian Kenny work separately across various media, as well as collaboratively under the umbrella of SUPERM, a multimedia art team creating site-specific gallery and museum installations worldwide. Mogutin has attracted international attention with his raw and candid urban portraiture documenting various youth subcultures and fetishes, collected in his critically acclaimed monograph Lost Boys (powerHouse Books, NY, 2006), as well as his writings and Russian translations of Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and Dennis Cooper. In his more recent work Mogutin merges the performance-based practices and event-based art, mapping his work from live event to visual object through photographs that serve as documentation/témoignage. This intersection of exhibitionism/exhibition in turn creates its own series of pairings, joining the intensely personal (orgasm) with the overtly theatrical, the performer with our presence as voyeurs, the artist as (self) recorder and as witness. The sense of trace or residue is not only manifest in the fact of making the images themselves but also in the small details of the performances that they contain: the classic cum shot, a jockstrap left in a sink, bondage gear. In contrast to Mogutin’s photographs, Kenny’s drawings and engravings demonstrate a very distinct stylistic approach. Working in a spontaneous or stream-of-consciousness manner and influenced by the energy and spirit of street art, Kenny layers imagery, deconstructs text and references from pop culture and sports to create a kind of brut expressionist panorama that oscillates between autobiography, social commentary and the absurd. This exhibition explores themes of INTERPENETRATION from multiple perspectives: a physical intersection of separate bodies of work addressing the give-and-take dynamic of Mogutin and Kenny as artists and lovers; as a power exchange of dominance and submission (wrestling, S+M, cock fighting) and the referencing of “cock” as both male organ and bird (according to Mogutin, “cock” (petúkh) is Russian prison slang for “faggot”). Both artists also navigate shifting boundaries of geographical and cultural transplantation. In this sense, INTERPENETRATION addresses the fluidity of identity, where sexual becomes political and vice versa. The title also references Mogutin’s forced emigration from Russia in the wake of two highly publicized obscenity cases, carrying a potential prison sentence of up to seven years. He was granted political asylum in the United States with the support of Amnesty International and PEN American Center.

- Guy Berube, director