When the World’s On Fire
Kevin McNamee-Tweed
Published on the occasion of When the World’s On Fire Aug. 24 - Oct. 21, 2023 Organized by Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Tennessee Chattanooga, and curated by Rachel Waldrop, Director and Curator
When the World’s On Fire
Kevin McNamee-Tweed
The ICA presents a solo presentation—the first institutional exhibition—of new work by Durham, NC based artist Kevin McNamee-Tweed featuring over thirty-three new 'ceramic paintings', as well as new vessels and drawings comprising monotypes, pencil, paint and mixed media works on paper, canvas, muslin and cardboard. The accumulation of mythologies and historical narratives, including Southern traditions such as craft, storytelling, and music, are of keen interest to McNamee-Tweed and his practice. His ruminations oscillate between the personal, the mundane, the absurd, and the grandiose. The title of the show, When the World's on Fire, takes its name from the traditional Southern song reckoning with the notion of End Times. And, linking with the artist’s focus on regional ceramic traditions, the title refers as well to the creative and destructive power of a kiln. With both pathos and humor, his intimately scaled works offer glimpses of subjects from the human to the animal to the inanimate. While much of his work may be naturally situated within the context of image-making, painting, and drawing, McNamee-Tweed works extensively with clay. Incorporating native clays and regional traditions, the artist relies on time-honored as well as idiosyncratic uses of clay and glaze materials. He makes intimate, utilitarian objects and many things which situate themselves between categories, such as function-resistant objects, ceramic books, and wall-hanging pictorial ceramics, which have become his primary focus in recent years. His pictorial ceramics or ‘ceramic paintings’, employ meticulous techniques, controlled processes, and tempered experimentation to achieve image-based corporeality featuring exaggerated surfaces, textures and visual effects. Relating intimately to the hand and the eye, these book-sized objects carry a strong element of storytelling.
Works
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Bradley King
Stray Epiphanies
"It is very difficult to transmute visual art into words without bullshit." - Lita Hornick
Planet in a Pushcart
Planet in a Pushcart
2023
2023
A warning about pretentious and misleading nonsense seems like a good way to begin any writing about art, but it is especially appropriate for discussing the work of Kevin McNamee-Tweed. This is partly because the work so richly explores relationships between the visual and the lingual, and partly because, like Hornick's admonition, this work betrays a skepticism toward language which somewhat mysteriously seems to impel its acute storytelling and lyrical wit. An artist who once identified as a poet, but now jokes about having "reformed," Kevin makes pictures that offer the distinct pleasure of reading. Some of the pictures imply a story like a paragraph clipped from a larger work, and many of them capture movements of thought in the same way a good poem goes down the page. They are funny and sharp and wide
awake, so that looking at Kevin's work makes you want to walk around with him and dig what he digs, and have him draw what excites you, too. Bernadette Mayer says that the pleasure of a poem is the pleasure of thoughts passing beautifully, and these pictures offer a similar sort of delight, except that they are present all at once in a way that no piece of writing could be. Here the thoughts play not between the lines of a poem but between the various visual elements of a single piece, and also between the different pieces that make up his interconnected, immersive body of work. An image seems to start one place, see itself there (the mirror is one of Kevin's favorite refrains), and begin a trip of reframings and reconjugations to get the work where it needs to go, on down the page so to speak, and with a wit and care that makes it easy to connect with and enjoy, but often difficult and ornery too. One of the recent "tabletop”/ "accumulation" pieces – which all depict a buffet of materials hung on a wall above a table – seems to show us this trip as it is happening: amorphous figures walk out of, or into, a vase (the artist's metonym of sorts for the pictorial ceramic surface). Are such transitory figures anxious and restless or playfully exploring? In other
Tabletop (Accumulation Life)
2023
Day and Night (The Tree)
Villard’s Leaf Face
2023
2023
pieces the same figures show up again in drawings taped to tables or walls, like they are rehearsing for future appearances. On these trips of his many forms and characters, Kevin clearly has to redraw the same or very similar images dozens of times, at least. A fascination with a particular drawing or way of depicting something seems quickly to become a mania, but he would say, "I'm just trying to feel why I love them so acutely." The "tabletop"/"accumulation" pieces are personal narratives of an image-philia, an exuberance over, as Kevin puts it, "being impressed by how someone rendered something, or by how bad it is!" The poetcritic John Yau, in his review of Kevin's summer 2023 show in New York, calls Kevin's ceramic pictures "objects of amazement," and Yau seems right when he says that one of the chief pleasures of the work is its "sense of wonderment”. Leaf Face, who is new to Kevin's outfit of characters, speaks to an animistic quality in the recent work, in which almost every image seems to take on a sort of agency or individual will. The Leaf Face image is lifted from a sketch by Villard de Honnecort, the 13th Century French artist who is known to us now only through his one extant sketchbook, and I suspect that Leaf Face has grown important to Kevin
because he is always seeing faces in the leaves, so to speak. Everyday objects, plants and flowers, and found drawings and texts all clearly take on their own "image integrity and sovereignty," to quote the artist again. Things like candles and trees seem charmed with significances and feelings that are not merely Kevin's or our own. The pictures so diligently work with the agencies of both things and images of things that they form a visual record of what the poet Sunnylyn Thibodeaux calls "full receivership," which she takes to be the basic task of poetry. In a recent letter to me she wrote, "We are sharing with the energies of the atmosphere every time we create. And I believe, more importantly, they are sharing with us. Full receivership." Such excitement of receivership is a good frame through which to see Kevin's latest book project, Pure Paragraphs (published by Happy Apples Press and Dutton Gallery). A collaboration with about 130 writers and artists (including Sunnylyn and myself as co-author), each was prompted, or more anti-prompted, to send us a paragraph on whatever they have been thinking about or been excited by. This decentered authorship reflects Kevin's eagerness to share in the energies crackling all around him, and his belief in the importance of bringing them together.
Flower (and Shoe)
2023
The result is a book that forms a tableau of the wildly various energies at play among a large swath of artists currently at work.
Flyer (St. Mark’s Church (1972)
2023
Lightbulb/ Spiderweb
2023
Source materials so frequently and conspicuously reappear in Kevin's pictures that it begins to feel like he’s scrutinizing his relationship with influences and inspirations, a relationship that seems based on unlikely comminglings of sincerity and mockery. Comics have clearly contributed to Kevin's craft of layering pictures into movements of thought, and like comics his pieces show that you don't have to make bright or profound remarks when you have a witty eye. Take, for example, his picture of an illuminated lightbulb as a spider set in its web. This piece takes highly familiar images, both with records as symbols, and puts them together to make a funny, ominous glyph, perhaps about thought itself, or the trouble that a bright idea might get you tangled up in. There's no shortage of irony in these pieces, but only enough to make the beauty stand out against the naiveté, and this makes the work eventful and alive. That last line I actually stole from Ted Berrigan's review of a Joe Brainard show, and I believe he was plagiarizing something John Ashbery had said about another artist. But it is appropriate here not only because Kevin fills his pictures with material lifted from others (like the text in Flyer, from a poster for a Brainard
reading at St. Mark's), but because there is a romance in his work with both art history and personal history that is so sincere it "flies close to the sun of corni- ness," as the artist himself has said. But, I would add, a romance that melts and falls back to Earth, back to us, partly through making fun of itself, and artists, and perhaps us the viewers too. Kevin’s work pushes us to understand vulnerability and irony not as the poles of some kind of spectrum, but as instead tied at the hip, so that an intensification of one somehow demands a beefing up of the other. There's a mischievous sabotage of "Art" and its culture here that is reminiscent of how the New York School poets I've mentioned were so playful and irreverent toward "Poetry," but with no proportionate loss of devotion. Much of Kevin’s recent work places front and center his debt to such poets and to the so-called avant-garde. Kevin is unafraid of bare-faced plagiarism in a way that reminds me of how Berrigan relished sliding other people's writing into his own, reminding readers of a truth most poets and artists might wish to bury: that any true voice is thick with love and theft. This is a plagiarism in which what is lifted is not so much claimed as one's own as shown to have no true owner or context. Even the
Avant-garde Patrol
2023
title of this exhibition is taken from the Southern standard gospel tune made famous by The Carter Family, a nice contrast to the New York poetry references, and an instance of Kevin's "appreciation for the American vernacular" to quote Yau again. But here "When the World's on Fire" gets recontextualized into an evocation of the apocalyptic moment in which we find ourselves now. Kevin has made a habit of titling shows in ways that play with the meanings of words, the connections between the pieces, and the heads of viewers. To name a few recent exhibitions: Self-tourism, Literature, and Pilcrow. The reflective, silly, and at times evasive layerings of text and image make it impossible to see all that is to be seen here, impossible to take in the ranges of meaning-making in an art so painstakingly attentive to what it is doing.
Frog Hop
2023
If reflection on where he is coming from artistically is an important part of Kevin's practice, the personal and the intimate have become just as vital to him. Anchoring this exhibition in a reference to Southern music points to his own roots. Kevin grew up in North Carolina and after some years of wandering has recently made it his home again. And now, looking to the traditional ceramic arts of the region, he harvests clay on regular walks
through the pines. Pieces that simply read "Friends" and "Tenderness" are similarly personal, and still others less obviously emerge from love and friendship. The dancing, smiling frog, for example, is a figure Kevin started drawing with his son and wife, who together they gave the silly name of Jimmy Murphy, and who has kept them entertained through the strains of lowsleep, low-money, new-parent blues. To me, Jimmy Murphy's various appearances all read as a sweet, goofy celebration of young-family intimacy. And Jimmy Murphy now finds himself joined by an equally touching character, Dog on Moon, a nod to a beloved dog Kevin lost last year. These two pieces in particular show how Kevin has grown uniquely skillful at shaping personal, passing moments – a joke between friends, a sudden sense of joy or sadness – into vessels that can reach and connect with others. When Kevin looks outward from the home onto "the world," as we call it, we get a very different sort of recurring image: the "Planet in a Pushcart," a play on hell in a handbasket, depicting the Earth being carted off, taken away from us, often in flames. But who is this angel who seems to be carrying the Earth back from those who would cart it off into the fires? The presence of all these characters in his first
Dog on Moon
2023
Angel Carrying Earth Over Flames
2023
Daryl’s Store
Bookshop (closed)
2023
museum exhibition make for what Kevin calls a "more autobiographical show" of "me mining my own self-mythologies," and like so many of Kevin's anti-heroes, the angel is a reincarnation from earlier pieces. In her previous life, she was Sallie, and had been depicted as happily selling seashells – perhaps a sort of dreamdouble of an artist who can fulfillingly, maybe even innocently, render to buyers the simple beauty she has found. And in this sense, she forms part of a coterie of characters orbiting around some practice of charmingly absurd commerce: Daryl's purist “I sell what I want shop” (which seems to stock a candle that’s appeared in Kevin’s work for over a decade and a Jimmy Murphy); the two beatnik buddies looking longingly into the closed (permanently?) bookstore; or most pure of all, Jeff's Two-Person Hats, with its storefront featuring several hats that would require two heads to be worn. There's an anxious precarity to such scenes, which seem haunted and threatened by our burning world, and which, as Kevin shows us in the "kiln interiors," were themselves born in flames.
2023
The mood is too wry to be called nostalgic, but it's certainly close to that. Perhaps their prickly oddity is the effort of
a wry mind to come to terms with its nostalgia. An artist, having to brand and market themself in the grind of selling art, might find admiration or even envy for any of these perhaps more pure enterprises, but especially for the ease and power of Sallie, who in her most recent forms, seems able to hoist "the world" back from the flames. But it is possible that Sallie, well-intentioned as she may be, has it all wrong; that "the world" as we've made it is in fact ripe to be carted off and burned, not so we can join Dog on Moon, but for all that such fires might clear the way for down here. And Sallie's seashells, after all, are not in feel and size all that different from the small ceramic pieces on which Kevin depicts such scenes, pieces that would sit in our hands as tenderly as a book. Their disarming appearance tells us all about Kevin's aversion to masterpieces and his disinterest in the monumental. Lightness, playfulness, and smallness are profoundly important for him, but equally so is presenting these qualities with an impish intelligence that jabs at the high-andheavy seriousness of "the arts." The very, very small vases and bowls, when viewed alongside the pictorial pieces, force us to think about how all of this ties into the history of ceramics. They refuse to let us
Sallie’s Shells LLX (More Than Shells)
2020
Wacky Potter Pedagogy
2023
Container (Half Ripe with Tooth)
Wacky Potter Pedagogy (Color Spots)
2020
overlook the unique material thingness of the images, and point us to their connection to the Earth and to the human hand. The pleasantness of these objects shows us that to quicken the mind, you don't have to give up pleasing the eye. Kevin is a true colorist with a keen sense of light and a palette that is all his own, and it is here that he finds that distinctive tone of a worn-in, pensive warmth, which is also somehow distant and aloof. And thoughtful, funny, and barbed as Kevin's scenes may be, it is their bizarre physical beauty that counts the most. It warrants mention that he was never schooled in the traditions and practices of clay and glaze. His techniques and material language are self-developed, which is not to say that there is not precedent for his methods in the vast history of ceramics. And his reckoning with what he calls the "mad chemistry" of glazes is likewise idiosyncratic, as all his glazes are home-mixed from well-worn recipes or wild experimentation. Even knowing nothing about ceramics, one can't fail to notice his precision and control with such technical matters.
2023
In the Wacky Potter Pedagogy pieces (a title that evokes "The Mad Potter of Biloxi," George E. Ohr, another Southern
ceramicist) Kevin would seem to be the sternly disappointed teacher and the struggling student, which says more than a little about the frustrations of self-learning such a difficult skill. Notice all of the broken pieces in the bottom right of the image, and imagine what Kevin's studio floor must look like. This disciplinary scene is one Kevin's most harsh and unpleasant, even if still funny. It is surely no coincidence that it becomes a backdrop to a few of the pieces that would otherwise be simple ceramic surfaces, like the colorful polka dots, which might be Kevin's way of telling us how hard he had to work to make them. Despite the discipline and mastery here, all of his pictures still manage to capture the visual delight of a sketchbook: the pleasure of playing with faces, hands, animals, plants, and most importantly the lines. A sketch-like, ephemeral feeling is ever-present in Kevin's pictures, and yet, paradoxically, they are fired into the permanence of stone, like cuneiform tablets, and in that sense they do form little monuments, not to any knowledge or truth or immortal beauty, but to stray, passing epiphanies. And despite the intense and near-obsessive air that can fill a room of his work, everything still comes across always with a smile. It's often a "wry smile,"
Growth
2023
Discovering Daffodils Each Spring
to quote the artist one last time, which is "really just a respect for transitions"– for ongoing receivership and amazement. I would resist the word "growth" here, if it wasn't the title of one his most funny and strangely moving pieces. Sometimes the smile of Kevin's work is less heady and more child-like, as in the case of the alienfigure who looks in wonder at a daffodil, with a title that suggests how the surprises of each spring can make the world feel like a place we've never been before. 2023
Given his tricky relationship to language, Kevin must enjoy that there are no good words for these objects he makes, no easy verbal reference points for what they even are. Paintings? Drawings? Ceramics? Literature? Or maybe clay paintings? Or pictorial ceramics? None sound quite right. And that there are no good ways to transmute these pieces into words without bullshit, so to speak, is only a bonus pleasure of Kevin's work.
Bradley King is a publisher and (un-reformed) poet currently living on the outskirts of Silver City, NM.
Index
1.
4. Planet in a Pushcart 2023 Glazed ceramic 6.25 x 5.25”
2.
7. Kiln Interior (3) 2023 Glazed ceramic 5.75 x 7”
5. Accumulation (Goya's Cats, Telephone) 2023 Glazed ceramic 6.5 x 7.25”
8. Kiln Interior (July) 2023 Glazed ceramic 8.5 x 6.75”
6. 3. Accumulation (The) 2023 Glazed Ceramic 7.75 x 6.25”
Foot: Flower 2023 Pencil on paper 8.5 x 6.5”
Blue Crawdish Bowl 2023 Glazed ceramic
9. Kiln Interior (Milky Red and Yellow) 2023 Glazed ceramic 4.25 x 5.5”
Black Barrel Hill (with view of Distant Highway) 2023 Glazed ceramic 2.25” diameter
10. Bookshelf 2023 Pencil on mulberry paper 5.25 x 6.75”
13. Beatniks 2023 Pencil on paper 6.75 x 5.75”
14. 11. Boulevares (Eno) 2023 Glazed ceramic 4.25” diameter
Broadcast 2023 Monotype on kitakata paper 5.5 x 6.5”
16. Fan 2023 Glazed ceramic 6.5 x 5”
17. Candle (Script: Ribbon:Smoke) 2023 Glazed ceramic 3.5 x 3”
15. 12. Mystery History 2023 Glazed ceramic 7.5 x 6”
Fan (with colored papers blowing) 2023 Glazed ceramic 7.5 x 6.5”
18. City Scene 2023 Monotype 6.25 x 5”
19. Eno River Red Peach Stone Bowl 2023 Glazed ceramic 5.25” diameter
22. Inner Spring Outer Reaches 2023 Pencil on paper 4.5 x 5.25”
23. 20. Hop 2023 Monotype on kitakata paper 6 x 6.5”
Cherub with Writer's Block 2023 Pencil on mulberry paper 4.5 x 6”
21. Angel Carrying Planet 2023 Glazed ceramic 6.5 x 7.75”
25. Growth 2023 Glazed ceramic 7 x 8”
26. Jug with Lid 2023 Monotype, ink, and pencil on kitakata paper 7.25 x 6”
27. 24. High Night (Tiny Vase) 2023 Glazed ceramic
Hawk 2023 Pencil on mulberry paper 6.5 x 5”
28. Pot Sketch 2023 Pencil on mulberry paper 5 x 4.75”
31. Puglia Plate 2023 Glazed ceramic
34. Night Sky Platter with 6 Clays 2023 Glazed ceramic 4.5“ diameter
32. 29. Pottery By Your Friends 2023 Glazed ceramic 4” diameter
Untitled (Contour) 2023 Pencil and ink on kitakata paper 6 x 5.25”
35. Mother Worried That Her Child Is Into Pottery 2023 Pencil on mulberry paper 5.5 x 7.5”
30. Lightning Strikes Flower (Bud Witness) 2023 Glazed ceramic 5.5 x 6.5”
33. Lorenzato's Pear 2023 Glazed ceramic 4.75 x 4”
36. Platter (Prism Spots) 2023 Glazed ceramic 5”diameter
37. Room 2023 Glazed ceramic 6.75 x 8.5”
40. Street Scene 2023 Monotype on kitakata paper 7.5 x 5”
43. Untitled Photograph 2023
38. (Ghost) City Scene 2023 Monotype on kitakata paper 5 x 4”
44. 41. City Scene (Walker, Bus) 2023 Monotype on kitakata paper 6 x 4.5”
39. City Scene (Bus, Moving Walkers, Red Light) 2023 Monotype on kitakata paper 6 x 3.5”
42. Table Top (Arrangement) 2023 Glazed ceramic 5.5 x 6.5”
Studio 2023 Glazed ceramic 4.75 x 5.75”
45. Proposal for new page in Book of Hours (Ghent) 2023 Monotype on kitakata paper 7 x 7.5”
46. Sun Chaser 2023 Pencil and ink on paper 5.5 x 7”
49. Theatre of Pots 2023 Pencil on mulberry paper 5 x 6.5”
52. Toothbrush 2023 Glazed ceramic 4.5 x 4.25”
53. 47. Tenderness Bowl 2023 Glazed ceramic 4” diameter
50. Tiny container with Lid/Spout 2023 Glazed ceramic 1.75” diameter x 2” tall
Untitled Tiny Vase 2.34 2023 Glazed ceramic 2” tall
54. 48. Bowl Upside Down 2023 Digital photograph
51. Wacky Potter Pedagogy 2023 Glazed ceramic 7.75 x 6.75”
Angel Carrying Earth Over Flames 2023 Glazed ceramic Recto/Verso 5.5 x 6 “
55. Untitled 2023 Monotype 7 x 5.5”
58. Washing Up 2023 Ghost monotype on kitakata paper 6 x 4.5”
61. Worried Sick (Mother of Potter Child) 2023 Glazed ceramic 6 x 7”
56. Tabletop (Accumulation Life) 2023 Glazed ceramic 6.5 x 7.25”
62. 59. Weeping River Peach Cup 2023 Glazed ceramic
The End (Screen) 2022 Glazed ceramic 6.75 x 7.5”
60. 57. Weeping Pink on Black Sky Cup 2023 Glazed ceramic 5.25” diameter
Worried Sick (Potter's Mother) 2023 Monotype on kitakata paper 5 x 6”
63. Room (Accumulation Narrative) 2023 Glazed ceramic 7.25 x 8.5”
64. Untitled (Lemon Tree) 2023 Glazed ceramic 4 x 4.25”
67. Day and Night (The Tree) 2023 Glazed ceramic 5.25 x 5.5”
68. 65. Lemon Tree 2023 Glazed ceramic 6.5 x 7.25”
Museum 2023 Monotype on kitakata paper 6.75 x 4”
69. 66. Daryl's Store 2023 Glazed ceramic 7.25 x 6.5”
Sophie Sketch 2023 Pencil on mulberry paper 6 x 4.5”
70. Virgil's Bar 2023 Monotype on kitakata paper 9 x 6.5”
71. Night Whispers of Pots 2023 Pencil on mulberry paper 7 x 6”
72. No Moon (Tiny Vase) 2023 Glazed ceramic 2” tall
73. Virgil's 2023 Glazed ceramic 6.5 x 6.75”
76. Telephone (Pot) 2023 Glazed ceramic 7.5 x 6.25”
77. 74. Plein Plein Air (After HW) 2023 Monotype on kitakata paper 6 x 8.5”
Moon Viewing 2023 Monotype on kitakata paper 8.5 x 7”
78. 75. Clean Sky (Tiny Vase) 2023 Glazed ceramic
Lines, Trees, Vision Swirls Platter 2023 Glazed ceramic, 5.75” diameter
79. World on Fire 2023 Pencil on kitakata paper 4 x 5.5”
Jake Xerxes Fussell plays a set at the opening of When the World's on Fire, August 24, 2023 in the Roland Hayes Concert Hall at UTC.
About the artist: Kevin McNamee-Tweed (b. 1984) is based in Durham, North Carolina not far from where he was raised. His work has been exhibited extensively around the US and in Europe. Recent solo exhibitions include Dutton Gallery (New York), Cob Gallery (London), Steve Turner (Los Angeles), L21 Gallery (Mallorca). He has participated in group shows in Germany, Italy, Spain, France, Australia, Iceland, Greece, and the UK. He is the recipient of numerous awards and residencies including the Ella Fountain Pratt Award, the Mildred Pelzer Grant, the Willhelm and Jane Bodine Fellowship, and the Montello Foundation Fellowship. Reviews of his work have appeared in Artforum, Art in America, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Artnet, Glasstire, and Hyperallgeric, among others. A monograph on his ceramic work was published by Steve Turner (Los Angeles) in 2020. He holds a BFA from New York University and an MA and MFA from The University of Iowa. He has curated many projects in addition to his own shows and has collaboratively published dozens of books. Upcoming projects include solo exhibitions at The Greenville County Museum of Art in South Carolina, Tatjana Pieters in Ghent, Belgium, and JVDW in Dusseldorf, Germany.
General operating support for the ICA is provided by UTC’s College of Arts and Sciences. The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga is an equal employment opportunity/affirmative action/Title VI/Title IX/Section 504/ADA/ADEA institution. ICA Chattanooga adheres to WAGE guidelines and standards for compensation and financial practices.
All artwork (plates 1-79), images in essay, and studio images © Kevin McNamee-Tweed Exhibition installation images © North Light Imaging (interspersed between plates) Stray Epiphanies © Bradley King Digital publication design Jared Ritz
KMT would like to thank Rachel Waldrop, Bradley King, Jared Ritz, Sonia Dutton, and Steve Turner