ABOUT
@bu_graphicdesign
@bostonpainting
@pmp.bu
@bostonsculpture
@buvisualnarrative
she/her
Abbi Kenny
Born in Boston into generations of New Englanders, I make materially dense paintings depicting regionally and personally specific objects. By recreating inherited family recipes, interior dining scenes, and kitchenscapes, I seek to understand and locate myself. I look to discover my identity within the truths and fictions of culture-making. I utilize cuisine and the tradition of still-life painting to digest the legacies of class, place, and history.
My practice is an alchemical exploration of acrylic paint: I pour, stencil, airbrush, sand, and render material into unexpectedly representational paintings. While my work may seem initially photorealistic, the topographical surfaces of each canvas dissolve into color, shape, and texture. By clashing together distinct paint languages, I disrupt the viewer’s expectations of visual coherence calling attention to the mundane—asking more of everyday objects and cultural behaviors. As an artist, I ask, what is remembered and what is lost? The unease of the compositions positions the viewer in my place as the sole inheritor of my parents’ family histories, each entangled with New England.
Through my engagement with history, while painting everyday objects, I push up against the legacy of pop art. Matrilineage and depictions of caretaking co-opt pop art’s visual lexicon with a feminist lens, probing ideas of pop culture applied to women’s spaces and belongings. I transcribe my grandmother’s handwritten recipes alongside 1970s Betty Crocker recipe cards, trompe l’oeil yet larger than life and loaded with materiality. I am the historian’s unexpected assistant, an heir, and a translator. I make art that collapses generational visual culture, bringing regionally specific objects into circulation in a contemporary world. Unlike a historian though, my work does not take its final form as a thesis, but rather as a series of additional questions and observations bound up and investigated through the transformative qualities of paint.
Acrylic, molding paste, acrylic gouache, black pepper, glitter, glass beads, muscovite mica, glass flakes,
and Yupo collage on canvas, 60 × 48 in.
(My Mother Calls It Raw Cranberry Sauce), 2023.
Acrylic and graphite on canvas, 12 × 20 in.
Acrylic, acrylic gouache, graphite, and colored pencil on canvas, 30 × 40 in.
Acrylic, molding paste, pumice gel, glass beads, beads, rice, glass flakes, muscovite mica, and paper collage on canvas, 30 × 30 in.
Acrylic, acrylic gouache, molding paste, cellulose, graphite, rice, glass beads, paper collage, and oil on canvas, 48 × 96 in.