I personally believe that art is noble and that it has the ability to redeem both its creator and those who experience it. While being a product of its culture, art also defines, broadens and critiques that culture. What I found immensely thought provoking was the brutal critique of art AND culture expressed in Kurt Polkey's painting, drawings and video.
Kurt offers anger. Yes, I can paint, he seems to say. Look at the large horse figure at the gallerys entrance and the landscape (labeled for an unsophisticated audience). But you know what, I get the feeling Kurts sick of painting. I get the feeling he hates art and how painting is what the public expects visual art to be. I feel his anger towards painting and his anger towards art patrons, as well. The guns and horses of his paintings and drawings allude to a mythical sense of freedom and destiny that fuels our countrys official version of its history, but in Kurts hands these symbols are made tiny and rendered poorly, especially in the drawings. There is an overwhelming bleakness and large areas of empty space, which for me, point to an attitude that art is powerless, that it is overwhelmed by our banal anti-culture and offers little hope. When he takes bits of carpeting and detritus and mounts them in opposition to a small, sad figure in one case and a tiny beautiful image of a horse and its reflection in another, I get the message that he feels alone and isolated in a society that values garbage over art. Kurt seems to have used painting as a weapon to kill painting itself along with our expectations of it and of art, in general and he has succeeded. In spite of his best efforts to show the irrelevance of the art form, however, I left acutely feeling Kurts anger and questioning my own expectations and relationship to art and our culture.
Jefree Shalev
Kurt Polkey
kurtpolkey_gmail.com
