My name is Kevin C Lawler (he/him) and I am a painter working out of the Chicago area.
The impossibility of the island is my starting point. By this I mean that no self, no body, no experience exists in true isolation as every encounter with the world produces new and unpredictable forms of knowing that can’t be understood before the contact happened. We don't move through history, culture, and power as intact individuals who are then shaped by outside forces. We are created by those forces in ways that are ongoing, incomplete, and generative rather than simply determining.
I work across a large number of canvases simultaneously, building images through accumulation and collision rather than resolution. Figures from art history, cartoon culture, mass media, and direct observation occupy the same pictorial space but not as commentary on those sources rather as an attempt to paint what it actually feels like to exist inside a world saturated by all of them at once. The grotesque in my work isn't decorative. It's the shape a body takes when you recognize the self as an amalgamation of different constructs that arise depending on the conditions the body finds itself within currently.
The philosophical territories that I move through; Adorno's culture industry, Arendt's banality, Foucault's disciplinary body and Deleuze's desiring machines aren't applied to the work from outside. They're structural. I'm trying to find the images that live inside those arguments, the visual form of things that philosophy can name but not quite show.
I'm an ex-art conservator who’s now a homemaker who works in stolen hours. That’s my reality. My critique of administered life is being made from inside it, with a full understanding of my privileges which seems like the only honest place to make it from.