One Hundred Houses

Chris Kenny makes art out of found materials: twigs, maps, snippets of text.

The material for One Hundred Houses is provided by strangers’ landscape paintings, bought at markets and online auction sites (at the lowest bid, nobody else wanting them).

Each painting records a specific but unknown person’s view of the world.

What more potent medium could one use to make art than art? The appropriation of these abandoned pictures is an act of recognition and remembrance, rather than an act of vandalism.

Each painting is cut into a set of walls, facade and elevations, and assembled into a basic little dwelling. It is given a floor, a roof, a door and perhaps a window. The painting’s illusion of three-dimensional space is replaced by actual volume.

Each house is thereby transformed from a landscape to a memento mori object, but also a portrait, an inside-out structure reflecting a distinct individual’s outlook.

The houses come together as a town, a taxonomic collection or a chorus of many voices, beautiful and provocative.

The houses can be seen at the Rowley Gallery, Kensington Church Street throughout September and October.

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Chris Kenny / The Rowley Gallery