Nick Kennedy
4^th Feb – 11^thMarch

“All things keep on in everlasting motion,
Out of the infinite come the particles,
Speeding above, below, in endless dance.”

― Lucretius, On the Nature of Things (De Rerum Natura) c. 60BC

For his second solo show at Platform A, Kennedy presents recent work in a variety of media including, drawing, painting and sculpture. Kennedy’s work playfully parodies science, the dominant ontological pursuit of our time, sharing its aim to unearth truths about the natural world and our relationship with it. The exhibition offers a reductive, abstract visual language drawn from a variety of interests including, horology, electrical circuits, symbols and glyphs, patterns in nature, X-ray crystallography imagery and quantum mechanics.

Through his work Kennedy deploys technology and materials systematically to set up experiments that engage with human constructs - such as time and language, which shape, measure and define our experience of the world - often through the lens of the chance procedure, lending the work a flawed, absurdist quality. The unanswered mysteries of the universe at the indeterminate quantum level are also a deep source of inspiration for his own appropriation of the random.

Drawing and it’s inherent temporality is a key thread that weaves its way through the exhibition - from a recent series of works on paper, each produced in collaboration with machines over a single day to a pair of new kinetic sculptures that will draw for decades and outlive the artist. Presented here for the first time, his Chronogene sculptures act like abstract clocks, embodying the passage of time. Referring to both a history and a future of time, their carefully poised spring-like hands dance and rhythmically flick a trace of silver across a gesso surface on their cyclical journey. This slow drawing process will unfold over a lifetime, gradually revealing a geometric order concealed by the chaotic gestural action of the mechanism.

"Time changes the nature of the whole world; Everything passes from one state to another And nothing stays like itself."

― Lucretius, On the Nature of Things (De Rerum Natura) c. 60BC