Alexandra Kennedy
Urban Erasures

In Urban Erasures Alexandra Kennedy addresses the boundaries between art and life in the context of a non-objective painting practice. The project began with walking in urban spaces, where drawn to peripheral spaces of the city she encountered  ‘life as art’ in sites of graffiti and its erasures.  It is a project which is also engaged with painting’s own histories.  Informed by strategies of non-objective art and intersecting with ‘zero gestures’ located in the urban environment. Urban Erasures takes as its starting point the “…authentic fragment(s) of daily life…”(1) and  poses the question:  how can the spaces of art and of life be brought together in an abstract painting practice informed by interventions into the space of the city by artists who have worked to destabilize spatial conventions of both the city and the spaces of abstract painting?
 
Previously exhibited in Suite 20/21: Part Two, Dunedin Public Art Gallery curated by Lucy Hammonds. This is the first time the series has been exhibited in Tāmaki Makaurau. 

(1)Benjamin, W. (1978). The author as producer. In E. Jeohcott (Trans.), Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings(pp. 229). Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.