Jonathan LeVine Gallery 2024 Exhibit “Dust of Oblivion”

“New York, NY May 2024 – Pop culture icons resurface in artist Dan Kennedy’s solo exhibition Dust of Oblivion, a saturation of phantasmagoric landscapes illustrating the depths of the human collective unconscious. Kennedy expands upon the explorations of previous projects, delving into an earlier history of the construction and expansion of a mass commercial culture, where text and image are suspended in a world of memory and dream. An archeologist of visual language, Kennedy incorporates a conglomerate of vocabulary straddling 19th and 20th century, architectural images, and characters to create new, mysterious narratives and dense pictorial realms.”

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Edward Day Gallery 2007 Exhibit “Lost In The Echo”

“Kennedy continues his explorations of commercial culture or as he refers to it, “the commercial unconscious”. Referencing material from the past two centuries, his work mines a vast repository of visual history such as cartoons, Farmer’s Almanacs, animated films, advertising and 19th Century song sheets. Through a dense proliferation of imagery, text and seductive painting, Kennedy creates a rich and phantasmagoric depiction of this communal psyche.

A sense of mystery, stories untold, buried histories and political unrest ease through the paintings and pulls the viewer into a strangely familiar pictorial landscape. Kennedy also references a loss of time, innocence, and consciousness that has been deceived by new and old promises.”

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   The Monte Clark Gallery 2024 Exhibit “Brilliant Disguise” 

  ”With reference to cartoons and animated film, to old sign painting, text-      based art and formalist painting, Dan Kennedy’s paintings have a look that    often seems more hallucinatory than Pop. Kennedy uses recognizable icons  from childhood media-related recollections within an explosion of visual  information to draw the viewer in. In them we view stories within stories,  images upon images. Our eyes cannot remain static. With a masterfully  executed painterly style, Kennedy creates layer upon layer in mesmerizing  detail. There is great depth as a result of this clever layering. Images of  innocence are contrasted with caricatures of the sinister. Like fond childhood memories worn away, jumbled or tossed by a darkness within a dream like state. Nostalgia is counterbalanced by the insidiousness of commercial culture. While Kennedy’s iconic images and rich palette may lead us one way, his use of text may lead us another. Kennedy brilliantly collages together imagery resulting in an overall ambiguity that allows us to pull our own narratives from his mesmerizing worlds.”

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