ARTISTS

Betsy Kenyon

Project Space (2019)

Born in California, a westerner at heart, Kenyon has lived most of her adult life in the east and currently resides in NYC with her partner, Richard Rutkowski.  Her art explorations, exhibitions and rambling lifestyle take her to many parts of the country and world. Brooklyn Darkroom’s camper van residency enabled her to travel to the 4 cardinal corners of the contiguous United States culminating in a project exhibited at the United Nations in NYC, Four Directions. Other favorite residencies – Baxter Street/Pioneer Works & the Lower Manhattan Cultural Center; where she spent 3 months of the pandemic on Governors Island, working on Slumber, a book project documenting our isolated & surreal nights of unrest. Memento Mori, a techno-horror short film she co-created about a content moderator will be released this year. 

How does one quantify or describe the experience of nonrepresentational, nonfigurative photography consisting only of gradient forms and geometric patterns — the kind of abstraction afforded traditionally to painters and sculptors? Grey Matter,  Betsy Kenyon’s ongoing exploration of both traditional and invented darkroom techniques engenders the experience of form itself. The work plays with dimension, depth, and perspective, and suggests values of minimalism and psychedelia, free of literal subject matter, narrative, humanism, or statement. Kenyon deftly challenges the boundaries of photography, offers a new vision for the medium, and gifts us a greyscale language that is simple as it is profound.