David kennedy photography seattle

Remapping the City: An Interview with Dave Kennedy

Dave Kennedy. Studio view of A view to a passageway (in progress), 2015. Photo copies, green tube, wood block, & plastic mounted to Tyvek, 93 x 74 x 6 inches. Courtesy of the artist.

The Seattle artist Dave Kennedy finds familiarity in refuse and abandoned space. The idea of illusion is central to his practice, as he recreates urban scenes by mapping them with his camera. He takes hundreds of detailed photographs, prints them on flimsy copy paper, and stitches them together on clean, white walls. There is a tension, both between mimesis and distortion, and between safety and disarray, as he questions the assumption that photography can perfectly represent the world. While inherently distorted, these representational collages are convincing windows into the scenes he collects and reassembles.

Kennedy’s approach harks back to his origins, growing up in low-income housing in Tacoma, Washington. At first glance, the spaces represented in his works appear empty and lonely, but further viewing reveals they’re full of

Dave Kennedy


Awards

Grants for Artist Projects 2015
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Fellowship Awards 2017
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About

Dave Kennedy is a Seattle-based multimedia artist working in photography, collage, sculpture, and installation. He received an undergraduate degree from Western Washington University in visual communication and an MFA from the University of Washington in interdisciplinary arts. He is a recipient of the 4Culture Individual Project Award, the Joanne Bailey Wilson Endowed Scholarship, and the Vermont Studio Center Fellowship. Dave has recently served on Seattle Art Museum’s Blueprint Roundtable panel discussing the color line in the arts and participated as a guest lecturer at the Henry Art Gallery on the topics of beauty and social inclusion as an intro to Out [o] Fashion curated by Deb Willis. Dave’s works have been published globally in such magazines as Art21 and Numéro Cinq and exhibited both locally and internationally at such venues as the Brownsville Museum of Fine Art, Photographic Center Northwest

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