Matt Kenny

Office Space

June 27 - August 29

Jeffery Stark is pleased to announce the opening of "Office Space,” a solo exhibition by New Jersey-raised and New York City-based artist, Matt Kenny. The show is comprised of one painting, the most recent in an ongoing series portraying the skyscraper at One World Trade Center (OWTC, he/him) as a kind of cartoon imp or villain.

Kenny’s portraits of OWTC, embedded in his native cityscape, can be said to exemplify our strange saying “it puts a face on ____,” when we are talking about reportage around or memorialization of pain. We often need to conceive of big or difficult news in terms of one person’s intimate experience, because it helps us connect to something that would otherwise be too abstract to integrate. In that sense, “putting a face on it” is part of how we heal. Here, the artist anthropomorphizes the building, putting a face on civic grief after the World Trade Center attacks on 9-11-2001 and of course more literally putting a face the OWTC himself, whose very existence only serves to remind much of the US population of the most destructive attack on American soil since the Civil War. Like a son adopted into a family to restore its familial-ness in the wake of a lost child, OWTC was cursed from the start.

In April 2003, one month after the United States launched “Operation Iraqi Freedom” under false pretenses, Governor George Pataki christened OWTC, “Freedom Tower.” Architect Daniel Libeskind referred to his original design for Freedom Tower as, “restoring a spiritual peak to the city” in effect claiming the new, commercial high-rise as a kind of holy mountain rising from the ashes of Ground Zero 9-11 tragedy. But, as it turns out, one can either grandstand about memorializing the horrifically dead -OR- one can lease 3.5million square feet of office space on the most expensive building site of all time (not both). Coincident with the hiring of a marketing firm in 2009 to push the latter mission forward, the name “Freedom Tower” was unceremoniously revoked from the new building, and he was renamed One World Trade Center. This is akin to the municipality giving up on the new construction offering spiritual civic catharsis (a tall order to begin with), and instead giving its replacement son a name that rhymes with the great dead one’s. In a limp final gesture, an uninspired spire was plunked on top of OWTC to bring his overall height to 1,776 feet: one foot for each year after Christ was born until the Declaration of Independence. OWTC’s construction was finally completed ten years after it began, in 2013. This was the same year that ISIS took control of vast Northern swaths of Iraqi territory encompassing 4.5 million Iraqi citizens, launching a new four-year War in Iraq to subdue an unspeakable insurgency.

Kenny depicts OWTC hawkishly presiding over his neighbors, his brows perpetually furrowed in discontent and his arms in a state of Gargamel-ish readiness. This affronted building is a symbol not of collective mourning or sacred remembrance, but of American militancy and capital. Kenny’s repeated, meticulously crafted oil paintings of OWTC belie the artist’s sympathy for the building, caught as he is in a parental bloodbath of greed, grief and fear, and perhaps also the artist’s view that OWTC is exactly the son we deserve.

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Jeffrey Stark

88 East Broadway
Space B11
New York, NY 10002

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