James Kenny
- Michael Hanna
- May 10
- 2 min read
James Kenny is a landscape video artist and photographer who has exhibited in Ireland at the Signal Arts Center in Bray and several other pop up shows. He has an extensive background in motion and 3-D design and describes his work as being “inspired by Jean-Paul Sartre’s adage of ‘you are your life and nothing else’, and by my own local landscape, the continual observation of the people, architecture, conversions, music, noises, smells, dirt, animals and various miscellanea of my everyday life. I am drawn to the ignored, hidden places of the city and am fascinated by the seductions of monotony…The conceit of perception as a shared illusion, but one which also expresses intense individuality has always fascinated me and is something I have always tried to express”.
The video art and photography typically deal with conceptual approaches to landscapes such as depicting a chair amongst a debris of dried-out foliage, a violent crashing wave against the rocky shore, or capturing motion blurs with a moving film camera on a train with long exposures. James Kenny has us question the value of environment through unfamiliar scenery and superimposing other visual elements with landscapes, such as a woman’s portrait fused with the sky like a scene from an apparition.
With a sense of metaphor and symbolism, James’ video work can sometimes allude to concepts such as mortality and death with a consistent flock of crows soaring from a silhouette of grouped trees. His videos also express time and motion by capturing abstracted lights and blurred landscapes on trains. The photography remains well-executed portrayals of selective imagery typically capturing barren yet beautiful landscapes such as open farmland, a landscape of dried, shriveled shrubs, or dead trees.
Untitled # 14 (pictured above) depicts an aging chair amongst a debris of dried brush. The placement of the chair remains conceptual because on the ground remains a disturbance as if a farming machine had torn up the foliage and ground. Overall, the image almost looks as if an explosion had taken place from the chair and the occupant remains no longer with us. A cyclone of debris on the landscape floor and an ominous chair leaves lingering symbolism and remains one of James’ most conceptual photographs.
James Kenny expresses the inclinations of poetry and solitude in metaphorical and conceptual landscapes. His processes and methods utilize both digital alterations in video as well as documentative approaches in photography of finding the prime location, perfect timing, or conceptual placement of objects upon the landscape. These films and photographs convey a sense of longing for comfort or a search for answers amongst the sea of uncertainty surrounding contemporary identity as well as suburban nihilism and euphoria. James Kenny brings upon the focusing of the lens pertaining to the meaning behind our relationships with nature both in raw form and interrupted by human impact.
