Alice Gong Xiaowen, Kennedy Morgan

House of Seiko is pleased to present Malar, a dual exhibition of new work by Bay Area-based Kennedy Morgan and New York-based Alice Gong Xiaowen.

Kennedy Morgan is an Oakland, California-based artist and California College of the Arts graduate with a BFA in painting. Over the past few years, Kennedy has become a cherished participant in the Bay Area scene, often working in graphite applied to various substrates. Their meticulous graphite work takes form in delicate renderings of surreal amorphous fusions and synthetic ideas. The natural world is the well-spring for Kennedy, a proxy for their mind, body, and private spiritual life.

Alice Gong Xiaowen is an artist and curator based in New York. She received her BFA in Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2016 and was recently accepted into the Yale School of Art MFA program. Her thoughts linger on the conceptual connotations of matter, once translated and interpreted as material culture. Translation is both method and a subject. The ephemeral becomes solid. Light becomes heft—the lowly hallowed. Memory becomes matter. Xiaowen casts dough, pinched with the seams of the dumpling wrappers her grandmother taught her to make, then cast and forged into iron, literalizing the ingots they symbolize.

Coupling these artists is to elegiacally assert an intervention not yet considered. Prior to this exhibition, Kennedy and Alice had never met. Considering them together in the space of the gallery is to highlight the ostensible kinship their work shares and depicts through memetic bodily gestures and their consonant but seemingly individualized relationships with materials like iron and graphite. This exhibition acts as a tribute to that middle voice, the paradoxical third resting between the two artists.

Malar (ma·lar) adjective, adverb: gradient emerging, a rush of blood, numbness, dust, a wash, a presence that is released