Threshold
Exhibition Dates: Feb 7 - March 16, 2023
Edward M. Dowd Art and Art History Building
Art and Art History Gallery
Gallery Hours: M-F, 9am-4pm
Artist: Daren Kendall
Reception and Live Event: March 15, 2023, 5-7pm, Dowd Lobby
Threshold with Me
2018, Steel, concrete, brass, piano wire, felt, ceramic, and sound equipment.
Installation view, Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, Norman, OK
Threshold features a series of seven gates, rails, and platforms, constructed of steel, wood, brass, and wire, functioning as a sculptural dance barre and musical instrument. Conceived as a formal and conceptual passageway, the modular and interlocking structure disassembles and recomposes in relationship to the gallery, creating curious perspectives and unique forms in relation to the space itself. Discrete forms are interwoven throughout to create navigable destinations and intimate moments to intuitively navigate and explore the possibilities of poetry in its passage. Abstract plaster casts and felt forms are subtle reminders of the sensual play between the mind and body, shifting between the public and private experience of architectural and sculptural space. Threshold proposes a space for interpretation and perhaps more poignantly a heightened awareness. Kendall envisions a place in the making and invites visitors to imagine themselves moving through a moment suspended in time, evoking a sense of possibility and that something is about to happen.
MARCH 15, 5-7pm: Please join us for the closing reception as dancers and musicians from Santa Clara University’s Department of Theater & Dance and Department of Music collaborate in performance, activating the sculptural framework and instruments Kendall has prepared for the exhibition. Drawing inspiration from the Divine Comedy and Dante’s symbolic passage from Inferno to Paradiso through Purgatorio, the serpentine structure will formally fracture, conjoin, and reconfigure in 3 movements, as performers improvise and Threshold together.
About the Artist
Kendall challenges the notion of the static art object and hermetic studio practice with his site-responsive installations and events. His sculptural frameworks function as apparatus for drawing out the poetic potential hidden within everyday spaces and systems. Material forms are constructed, transformed, and evolve with an inner logic under the provision of potential change, shifting attention from the object of study to the creative process, metamorphosis, and the labor of artistic production itself.
Kendall has had solo exhibitions at Caren Golden Fine Art, and Margaret Thatcher Projects, NYC; at the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art in Norman, OK; Mansfield University, Mansfield, PA. His multimedia work has been screened at Great Lakes International Film Festival, ALTFF, Alternative Film Festival, Toronto; NYC Electroacoustic Music Festival, and Tehran University. He was awarded the Cultural Connections Fellowship in Clermont-Ferrand, France; the Barstow Artist-in-Residence at Central Michigan University; Saltonstall Residency in Ithaca, NY; Arts, Letters & Numbers, Averill Park, NY; and residency at the Istituto Universitario Olandese di Storia dell’Arte in Florence, Italy. Kendall received an MFA from Cornell University, where he was awarded the John Hartell Graduate Award from the College of Architecture, Art & Planning. He has taught in the Department of Art as well as the Department of Information Science at Cornell University, at the Pennsylvania College of Art & Design, and at Central Michigan University. He has presented his work at the University of Tennessee-Chattanooga, Fordham University, Georgia Institute of Technology, and Cardiff University in Wales, UK. Kendall was born in Buffalo, New York, and currently lives and works between upstate New York and Central Ohio where he is an Assistant Professor of Art at the College of Wooster.
This event is free and open to the public.
In compliance to ADA/504, please direct your accommodation request to Mitch Grieb at mfgrieb@scu.edu at least 72 hours prior to the event.