Country Fried: A Solo Exhibition by Kensey Kendall
hosted by necessary & sufficient coffee
Country Fried gathers Kensey Kendall’s muslin drawings into a tender, rigorous meditation on the ethics—and the impossibility—of keeping. Born in 2002 in Michigan’s Northwoods and now working from Chicago, Kendall approaches image-making as a form of custodianship: a practice that does not simply preserve the past, but re-animates it, submits it to touch, and asks what it means to live alongside what is already gone.
Overview:
Born in 2002 in the Northwoods region of Michigan, Kensey Kendall is a published poet and artist working out of her home studio in Chicago, IL. She received her BFA in Studio Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is concerned with finding a way to keep things that can’t be kept.
Artist Statement:
This body of work began to flower in March of 2022, after receiving a CD in the mail from the Mesick Historical Museum’s archivist and curator, Nancy Sanders. I had reached out to Nancy on Facebook Messenger, inquiring about a late photographer in the Northern Michigan community whose work she’d posted before. Her response was to mail me the disc, containing hundreds of photos donated by families in the surrounding rural area; fuzzy figures in the bluest snowfall, hills rolling on and on, lots of fish and hundreds of smiling faces, silly and straight ones too— many familiar even if they weren’t really.
My drawings on muslin began as a way of extending this archive into a living one and compartmentalizing the one we’re living in into its own; a way of talking to the past, allowing it to take up space alongside me in my studio and mediate with the present.
In pencil and cloth, I can really hold, keep, and understand each. I can converse with the faces in those archives like friends; I know who they are, where they come from, all of their habits and loves because we’ve grown up and passed together already. They are my way of collecting the uncollectable, in pursuit of making the most human parts of our shared histories physical; hopeful that if I can understand myself and others through story and symbolism, I might be able to commit us all to memory.
