FELDSOTT
HOWLS THAT WAKE US IN THE NIGHT
September 8 ~ October 21, 2022
Conversation with the Artist: September 14, 2022, 3:50pm - 5:20pm
Public Reception: September 15, 2022, 4 - 7pm
The Amelie A. Wallace Gallery at the State University of New York College at Old Westbury is pleased to announce the opening of Howls That Wake Us in the Night. The exhibition examines the West Coast painter Kenny Feldsott (b.1954)’s prolific and profound meditation on postcolonial traumas, violence, and human redemption. Featuring nearly forty paintings and works on paper that were produced from the early 2000s to today, the show addresses historical atrocities, such as the detentions in Guantanamo Bay, the US-Mexico border crisis, the torture at Abu Ghraib, and the toll of the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the ongoing crises of environmental collapse, war, and racial injustice. Rather than reporting events, Feldsott explores the depths of the human psyche and the primordial energies from which these impulses emerge, asking important questions about the nature of violence, cruelty, and how we might heal our spiritual and societal wounds. Feldsott’s mission as an artist is to incessantly question and challenge the underlying causes of the crises of our time, raising public awareness in the hope of restoring lost humanity. Through his engaging body of work, Feldsott offers a powerful moral compass amidst relentless crisis.
Feldsott’s dynamic and expressionistic styles have been compared to German Expressionism as well as Outsider Art. This exhibition presents a mature stage of Feldsott’s oeuvre that harks back to the tradition of Expressionists of the 20th Century, who also took inspiration from societies outside the mainstream: far-flung tribal societies in non-Western and folk-art traditions. Feldsott has been an avid traveler and healer, having spent years in South America and seeking spiritual experiences in far way places such as mountains of China. He shares the Expressionists’ affinity for flattened planes, crude, strong outlines, large exaggerated bodies, swirling movements, and energetic brushwork. In Liberation of Woman (2002), two female figures, one naked and bleeding from multiple gunshots, the other holding a gun, both shriek with pain and terror amid a burning city while jet planes fly above. The emotional power of the work evokes devastation and anguish reminiscent of Picasso’s Guernica (1937), adding to the roster of timeless images that indict warfare.
Feldsott began The Covid Diaries (2020~) while recuperating from knee surgery at the beginning of the pandemic. Keeping his canvasses to a manageable size (30 x 22 inches), Feldsott presents various motifs, including self-portraits depicted as a crippled man with a crutch. The series depicts the health crisis of the global pandemic in the context of environment destruction and social injustice. The Black Lives Matter movement is among the subjects he painted. One of his most recent works, It’s Complicated (July 2022), depicts two crudely drawn figures, one a patternized body in black holding a gun, the other in yellow with threatening long fingernails, kissing each other. This work is an observation of the camps that are for and against COVID vaccination, reflects the artist’s satirical view of the polarization over vaccines.
Feldsott Biography
One of the youngest exhibitors ever at SFMOMA in 1975, Feldsott all but disappeared from the art world, spending more than twenty-five years in Central and South America, where he worked on ecological restoration and cultural conservation projects and studied traditional medicine with Indigenous communities. Throughout this period, he continued to create a large body of work that, together with his past and current work, become a record of the human journey.
The exhibition is curated by Amelie A. Wallace Gallery Director Hyewon Yi.