Tim Kent

Art Brokerage: Tim Kent Canadian-American Artist: b. 1975. Kent's designs are based on images from personal archives and memories, as well as appropriated images from public archives. These compositions coalesce in paint, which is applied by scrapping, knifing, brushing, spattering. Supporting these actions is an underlying perspective design. Using long, hand-made rulers to trace intricate perspectival systems, which not only add context to the subject but also interfere and impose on the subject, Kent creates a logic of memory rather than merely one of measurement. These foundational lines remain visible in finished paintings, nesting around figures, cradling walls, and branching off into deeper space. In this way, his use of perspective shifts its semiotics from one that aims to define, focus, and clarify, to one that introduces complementary spaces and ideas, leaving viewers with the impression of simultaneous splices of time compressed into sometimes glitchy, shifting slides of experience. The perspective grid becomes a visual metaphor for the interconnectivity of how we construct our visual world and its influence across every level of existence. The key subject of Kent's practice is the operation of power in history, technology, society and art. Painting has its own relationship with power, both historically through creating representations of power players and events and through its construction of time and space using the perspective grid. Power depends on appearances. As such, painting reflects how power works; in this case, through forms such as architecture and symbolic hierarchies and relationships. By revealing the structures that create the illusion of realism without simplifying them, multi-point perspective images present the overwhelming complexity of power while passages of abstraction inspire reflection. In the context of the inordinately detailed images possible in today's world, Kent's paintings attempt to strike a balance between the hyper-real and abstraction, reminding us how humans see through ideas and not only perfectly rendered objects. Listings wanted.