#trevor kiernander

[ithacamoma]

20 QUESTIONS FOR: TREVOR KIERNANDER

“There is a Ghost”

Oil, acrylic, and oil stick on linen

101.5cm x 76cm (40in x 30in) (image courtesy of the artist)

1.Name:

Trevor Kiernander

2.Occupation(s):

Artist/painter

3.Where are you from and what is your education?

I was born in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, and grew up in Cambridge, Ontario, Canada, from the age of 12. I lived in Montreal between 2002-2007, London, England from 2007-2014, and back in Montreal since 2014.

Took Art Fundamentals and my Interpretive Illustration Diploma at Sheridan College, Canada, a BFA in Painting & Drawing from Concordia University, Canada, and an MFA from Goldsmiths, University of London, UK.

4.Where do you live/work (neighbourhood/city/country)?

Currently living in the Rosemont/Petit Patrie area of Montreal, and my studio is located in Parc Ex.

5.Does your location affect your practice?  

Definitely, both affects and informs. I am about a 20-minute walk from my studio and I have more studio space than I have ever had. Both of these factors allow me to work a lot, and experiment with new ideas and materials on a regular basis. And only in the past few years (since being back in Montreal) have I come to realize that my work is about my relationship to space, and therefore obviously the spaces I work in.

6.What is your favourite tool in the studio?

I have made my own version of a “brush”, but it’s top secret…

7.Where do you look for your source material?

Anywhere and everywhere, really. I take lots of photos when I am out, but I also like snagging other people’s images from the internet. Also screen shots of things I’m watching on my computer. They mainly reappear in paintings and drawings as fragments, but it’s all there in my head somewhere.

8.What is your daily art world read?

Painting at the End of the World  It is not necessarily a daily read, but Ian Gonczarow also runs an Instagram page of the same name and posts some really great work. I am also on a few mailing lists, like Artsy, etc., but there are a few online ones like Painters Talking Painting on FB (the new FB algorithms are pretty shit, mind, and so once you click on a news story, you seem to only ever get news from those sources). Other than that, it’s mainly Instagram.

9.What is your daily non-art-world read?

The Onion or Daily Mash. The “real world” news is too depressing…

10.What role does writing play in your practice? 

Not as much as I would like it to.

11.What role does research play in your practice?

Depends on the definition of research. I read daily, and have a pretty decent library in my studio, so I am constantly referencing things, remembering essays I have read in the past, looking at artist monographs, but also getting out to see as much art as I can around town.

12.What role does collaboration play in your practice?  

Not much at all, but I am always up for new things.

13.How does success affect your practice?  

Again, I guess it depends on one’s definition of success? Like, I successfully left my job in London and moved back to Canada to work full-time in the studio. I think “success” follows the same plateaus you find in an art practice. You work hard at something and then finally reach a particular level, keep that up for a while until the next plateau, and so on. I definitely don’t jump on to something that is “commercially successful” and keep that going. I get bored too easily.

14.How does failure affect your practice?

I don’t believe in failure but see mistakes as something to build from. It works that way in each painting as well. I often try different things when painting, colours, mediums, techniques, directions, and if it doesn’t work out, I keep it, and work other elements into the composition to make everything relate.

15.What do you identify as the biggest challenge in your artistic process?

Being able to keep painting.

16.Who are some historical artists you are thinking about?  

Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Willem de Kooning, Peter Lanyon, for painting.

17.Who are some contemporary artists you are thinking about?  

Again, in painting, Amy Sillman (US), Charley Peters (UK), Delphine Hennelly (US), Leopold Plotek (CA)… there are quite a lot, actually, and many I am happy to call friends. I try to see as much painting as I can and try to keep an open mind to it all.

18.How do you describe what you are making now?  

Oof. I just made myself a drawing station in my studio. It’s made out of scrap wood and a new IKEA table top I found.

As for my painting, I am working off of ideas from my current show at the Galerie d’art d’Outremont in Montreal (up until April 28th,), developing compositions and installation ideas made up of numerous surfaces. My work is continuous, meaning I don’t just make a particular body of work for a particular show, but I constantly paint, and then make a selection of work that I feel makes sense in the space I will be exhibiting in. I kinda go through a slump after a show, which I am sure a lot of people do, but I need to keep at it, so I spend a good week or two after the show, stretching and priming up some linen and canvas. I am really looking forward to working on more linen/canvas diptychs, this sort of duality thing I have been making since a residency in Leipzig in 2017-18. That, and trying to understand deeper connections between painting and music, rhythm, etc.

19.Who is an artist that you think deserves more attention?

Too many to mention. I think more attention needs to be paid to Canadian artists as a whole.

20.How can we find out more about you (relevant links etc)?  

trevorkiernander.com www.instagram.com/ttothek9/

[accessauction-blog]

Trevor Kiernander Voyeur, 2017 (Left) Mixed media on paper 12 x 12"

Estimated Value: $700 (framed)

Temple, 2017 (Right) Mixed media on paper 12 x 12"

Estimated Value: $700 (framed)

Trevor Kiernander earned his MFA from Goldsmiths, University of London in 2009. While living in England from 2007 to 2014, Kiernander exhibited extensively throughout the UK, and participated in exhibitions and projects in Canada, U.S.A., Germany, Russia, and Morocco. Since returning to Montreal in 2014, Kiernander continues to work full-time in the studio. His work is part of national and international, private and public collections, including Loto-Quebec, Mouvement Desjardins, Conseil des arts de Montréal, and TD Bank Group.

*

My paintings examine and assemble spaces, evolving further into abstraction where there still remains elements of landscape— both natural and urban— of architectural facades, shadows and structures, even signs and symbols; but not one particular thing stands resolute and definite.

[etiennelafrance]

October 31 – December 19, 2020

Echo: Charlene Hahne, Franziska Holstein, Franz Jyrch, Etienne Lafrance, James Low, Christine Nobel, Maria Schumacher, Matt Schust, Julia Lia Walter

As part of the event Pictura Montreal

Curator: Trevor Kiernander

Text by Trevor Kiernander

Echo brings together the works of nine artists hailing from Canada, Germany, and the UK, all of whom have devoted themselves to the practice of abstract painting. Each of these exceptional artists deals with abstraction through their own systems and personal language, making reference and connections to their environment, where images and ideas are bounced around through their process, reflected and reinterpreted, until reaching a point of completion that becomes part of the entire system once again. The works of each artist reference trace, memory, reflection, and residue – they echo.

One of the most interesting aspects of the work included in Echo is the size of the paintings. Abstraction has a long history of monumental paintings, but the work here is predominantly of a more compact scale. Perhaps this is an indication of the availability of space in constantly redeveloped urban areas, and due to the working conditions, but these smaller works have a particular intimacy to them, not often communicable by massive, imposing abstract paintings.

Charlene Hahne’s two large suspended works are the exception here in scale, but even so, the delicately stained, marked, and sewn pieces have a controlled sensitivity. In these tapestry-like works, the quietness beckons you to look and listen closer.

In her series of nineteen works, Franziska Holstein updates and reuses her own forms from previous projects, reconfiguring them in simple blue and white, like snapshots of an extensive historical body of work, each coded with a unique message within. In the nine paintings of Matt Schust, residual traces of formalism, colour-field painting, and minimalism are captured in this muted series, each offering a strong insight into a long-standing historical precedent. The expansive gridded paintings of Christine Nobel emanate visual white noise through the use of many colours of the spectrum, developing a starting point into an infinite space guided by both light and rhythm. Nothing is Going My Way, the titles given to Maria Schumacher’s series of one-shot process ‘action abstractions’, tell a tale of the artist’s constant quest, a Sisyphean task of erasure, repainting, and repeating. James Low’s paintings optically vibrate, through his method of painting with various styles and applications sometimes on both sides of a translucent canvas, pushing the language of abstraction that much further through the juxtaposition of recognizable images that hover in the vastness of the colour field which they inhabit. The spatial illusions created by Julia Lia Walter’s digital paintings, come in and out of focus, like driving through a thick fog, or watching the dust settle around you, while Étienne Lafrance’s ‘pop-ups’, collaged works perched atop traditional white gallery plinths, feel like painted gestures frozen in time, like Harold Edgerton’s photo Milk Drop Coronet. In Franz Jyrch’s Stick, ‘painting’ has been deconstructed, where stretcher bars hold multi-coloured rubber gloves in a manner that is both heroic and threatening.

The best abstraction today, of which these works are examples, hold as much power and information as their historical predecessors, but speak not so much about grandiose statements, but more subtle affirmations: less is more. Such a sentiment seems more important than ever with our super-sized and super-sped-up world, and something we need to listen closely to, how it rings out over the distance of time, just as an echo trails off from its initiating event.

[boudhabar]

Trevor Kiernander

[rebeccatraviswriting]

Now Available:

Catalogues for Trevor Kiernander’s exhibition Event Horizon: This Must Be the Place, which includes my essay Fragments of fragments, in space of space, of sites unknown.

[artotate]

DAY 1 - 30 DAYS PROJECT

Distilled pinpoints of clarity, colour splashed landscapes void of periphery but abundant in sense of place; the paintings of Trevor Kiernander simultaneously provoke and still the senses, creating a complex map of explosive thought patterns which resemble the urban landscape that the artist is so expert at isolating.

Trevor Kiernander's Here. Not Here exhibition at Art Mur, April 28 - June 16, 2012

HERE. NOT HERE. Art Mûr, Montréal, Québec April 28, 2012 - June 16, 2012 Catalogue essays by Dominique Allard and Cameron Skene

Meditations in an Emergency Text by Cameron Skene

Trevor Kiernander’s paintings approach a perceptual problem that dogs some painters at this historical juncture: with images easily and quickly plucked from a constant digital flow available to all, and with an urban environment that is constantly shifting and re-contextualizing constructed surroundings, the question is what on earth do we do with all this STUFF? The mid-twentieth-century American poet Frank O’Hara considered his art to be one of absorbing the churn of his surroundings, digesting and leaving a kind of quickly-assembled psychic popcorn trail that made sense of existence. It required an urgent and immediate note-taking, but an urgency that could easily be channeled into his lunch hours away from his job at the MOMA.

More recent painters of Kiernander’s ilk adopt strategies of visual note-taking: in the 80′s and 90′s, David Salle managed to rig his television to his computer (prior to more convenient and less expensive technology) in order to capture imagery as he channel-surfed his bloated CRT. In a less lazy mode, Wanda Koop’s recent exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada showcased a diligent, if undocumented production of hastily-drawn pictures on post-it notes, accumulated in a huge pile of them under showcase glass at the exhibition.

Similarly to Koop, Kiernander’s canvases strike one as being derived from snippets – as if one was listening to several different conversations at once, drunkenly memorizing them, and recounting them the next morning to a spouse over red eyes and corn flakes. But the calibrated precision by which Kiernander tells the story convinces you of the truth of the account.

The painter takes his cues from widely varied media, as well as his immediate surroundings. Sources seem incidental: color and composition is the crucible in which experience is cooked. Rules of painting are strictly – almost conservatively – obeyed. Kiernander treats space like the object it is. In one piece he allows a wash to drip, finishing the composition upside-down, drip-up, so that it works spatially with other seemingly disparate painterly textures and moves. It maintains a sense of visual unbalance that mimics the disjointed, recurrent de-contextualization of space in contemporary surroundings.

With some background in design, and an obvious interest in his architectural surroundings, each imagistic snippet is precisely calibrated and knit into the next move on the canvas. There’s a refreshing crispness in the intent, which clarifies a perceptual solution to the Shiva-like activity of everyday urban experience: a stalled snippet of time.

[rebeccatraviswriting]

Catalogue Essay | Trevor Kiernander: Fragments of fragments, in space of space, of sites unknown

To visually unpick a Trevor Kiernander painting demands somewhat of an archaeological approach. A raw canvas ground, treated subtly with a transparent undercoat, offers up a variety of precisely layered but fragmentary forms, each endowed with traditional painterly concerns of gesture, shape, colour and texture. 

These elements are carefully placed so as to invite the eye to delve across and through their painterly planes, which, like tectonic plates, seem to shift and reveal an opening of further territories beneath. In some cases, through the use of subtle white-washed glazes, there even seems to be the potential to dig beyond the raw surface of the canvas itself, to travel somewhere else altogether. The intuitive reaction to this fragmentary display is to attempt its re-assemblage, in order to glean an understanding of just what it is that we might be seeing as a whole. There are elements certainly of landscape, both natural and urban, of architectural facades, shadows and structures, even signs and symbols, but not one particular thing stands resolute and definite. Kiernander’s paintings are rather the abstract exploration of space and site, of shifting sands, fleeting forms – an impermanent, unfixed narrative reflective of both a personal quest for physical and mental space and an interconnected, fast-paced world which offers a limitless stream of possible source material.

The exhibition, Event Horizon: This Must Be the Place, held simultaneously in the McClure Gallery and Art Mûr, features Kiernander’s latest body of work. As the overarching exhibition title suggests, these works, all created within the last year, mark a fundamental shift in Kiernander’s situation and approach. An ‘event horizon’ is most readily associated with the quantum physics of black holes, denoting a theoretical boundary from which no further light or particles can escape. It is indicative therefore, of a point zero, a move forward and, perhaps more ominously, a point of no return. Meanwhile, the subtitle, This Must Be the Place, hints at the culmination of a search that has driven Kiernander’s work for many years – the pursuit of space, both physically within his own environment and illusorily within his canvases. And yet, neither part of the title offers a guarantee of certainty; both are based upon either undefined theory or imperative assumption. To truly understand Kiernander’s dislocated and fragmentary approach to painterly form, and his fascination with constructing space, it is necessary to defy the theoretical boundary set through the exhibition’s title, and look back to acknowledge seven uncertain and nomadic years he spent in London, UK, completing a Master’s degree at Goldsmiths.

It was Gaston Bachelard, in his seminal work ‘The Poetics of Space,’ who suggested “It is better to live in a state of impermanence than in one of finality.”[i] I wonder if Bachelard would still hold that assertion if he had livedas an emerging artist attempting to forge a viable live/work practice in contemporary London? In fairness, Bachelard’s conclusion seems to ring true in theory - impermanence offers freedom, the ability to roam, unburdened by the material and psychological constraints of finality. The concept, however, falls flat when projected upon a reality in which one isn’t necessarily given the choice between impermanence and permanence – where the transient state is rather enforced by uncontrollable social factors and its acceptance as a lifestyle is greeted more with a sigh of resignation, than a joyous sense of liberation or possibility. This was the unfortunate scenario that Kiernander, like many artists, experienced whilst living as a student and emerging artist in London. It’s a city, perhaps more so than any other in the world, where artists (not to mention other low income communities) increasingly wrestle with astronomically rising rents and the sheer speed and scope of gentrification – a process they are often charged with instigating. The particular time in which Kiernander resided there - between 2007 and 2014 - also fell within the period running up to and immediately following the 2012 Olympic Games, an event that only served to expedite the regeneration and rent-rise of previously affordable areas of the city. Kiernander’s experience of London, therefore, was for the most part one with little stability and no fixed address. He resided in over ten different locations in seven years, of varying size and standard, including a decommissioned council house, various flat shares and communal live/work studios.

One such studio, The Woodmill in Bermondsey, which operated between 2009 and 2011, has since become somewhat of a figurehead project in demonstrating the adaptability of artists within the upheaval of urban development. Initiated by a group of emerging artists and curators, it occupied a disused council building, and in its two-year lifespan provided one hundred artists and practitioners affordable studio and living space, renovated and built by the artist inhabitants themselves. Having completed his Master’s degree in 2009, Kiernander was amongst the first wave of artists to move into the complex, building a shared studio and participating in group exhibitions. The Woodmill’s function as a home to artists was unfortunately short lived (although the studio spaces remained accessible), and so Kiernander’s search for domestic space continued. More studios and short-term living situations followed, each cut short due to imposed regulation or redevelopment.

This state of habitual impermanence unsurprisingly influenced Kiernander’s paintings. Painting is a medium that demands physical space, both in order to work beyond the constraints of small scale and to contemplate works in progress with distance and perspective. The disjointed nature of Kiernander’s experience of site and home is reflected in the works he created during that time ㄧ tight compositions that hug the inner reaches of the canvas, echoing a sense of confinement inherent in cramped and communal living and working conditions. As greater stability resurfaced in Kiernander’s latter two years in London, so a sense of space was gradually freed up in his approach to painting, mirroring both his physical and psychological experience of the city. A feeling of dislocation and constraint is also evoked in the titles of his previous solo exhibitions within that seven-year period: Relative Detachments; To Build a Home; Here. Not Here; Uncommon Ground. 

It was a geographical shift, returning to Montreal in August 2014 – a city smaller, much less densely populated, less subservient to the grinding gears of gentrification and notably cheaper than London ㄧ that truly afforded Kiernander a renewed sense of liberation, time and space to pour into his paintings. His recent works include his largest to date; they also feature the brightest colour palette and his most expansive use of the pictorial plane. The physical evolution of his works in this way is again  recalled or reflected in the grandiose nature of the Event Horizon title. His paintings, too, have now broken a boundary - one imposed in part by himself, and majorly through his environmental context.

That’s not to say that vestiges of London’s built environment have disappeared completely from the artist`s motifs. The most immediate and loosely recognizable structures in his paintings can regularly be traced back to an architectural source. Both London and Montreal, with their clashes of old and new buildings, incongruously crammed together within the same sites, or reflected back on each other through glassy facades, offer a rich territory and often naturally abstracted imagery from which to draw. Kiernander in particular notes the elevated planes, experimental forms and ‘streets in the sky’ features of Brutalist buildings as being influential. Their underlying philosophies can also be aligned with Kiernander’s approach. For Brutalist architects such as Ernö Goldfinger, (architect of the notorious / iconic Trellick and Balfron Towers amongst many other urban projects in London) spatial philosophies were paramount to practice, and he released three seminal essays on the subject in the Architectural Review in 1941-42: The sensation of space, Urbanism and the spatial order and The elements of enclosed space. Architect couple Alison and Peter Smithson - purveyors of ‘New Brutalism’ in the UK (whose projects included the much contested Robin Hood Gardens estate)  aimed to create buildings “more complex, and less geometric…more concerned with “flow” than with “measure”[ii], a philosophy certainly comparable with Kiernander’s abstract and intuitive process of constructing form and space within the planes of his canvases. Residual evidence of Brutalism’s intersecting lines, raised walkways and sense of light falling onto or through surfaces are employed and refracted across his paintings, as perspectives are interrupted and diverted in order to open up new spaces.

This skewing of perspective, key to creating impressions of depth, is gained through the process of literally re-orientating the canvases as they progress. In doing this, there is no one way that the finished painting makes complete, linear sense. For example in This Must Be the Place, one of the three largest paintings yet created by Kiernander, the hazy mirage of an undulating post-industrial cityscape initially seems to emerge, but thanks to the rotation of the canvas during production, certain forms appear out of sync with that reading ㄧdrippy gestures seem to defy gravity ㄧ and such illusions of subjective coherence are quickly dissolved, abstracted and fragmented once more.

If Kiernander’s pursuit of space constitutes the subjective and conceptual drive for his works, then the joy of paint and its endless possibilities fuels his process. From the outset, his works begin with a slight subversion of the expected. Rather than masking the canvas with an entire layer of under-painting, he  uses a clear gesso, which allows the raw surface of the canvas to remain apparent. Should the entire canvas’ surface be masked with opaque ground, then a feeling of space would immediately be swallowed, the viewer blocked out;  the painting would take on more of the nature of a fixed object rather than an open arena for spatial potential. Instead, upon this transparently prepared ground, Kiernander lays individual foundations of angular blank forms upon which different motifs can be built. This immediately lends the formal components of the work an individual disconnect and creates an environment (particularly on the larger scale) that allows us to envisage actively navigating, rather than just passively viewing. Through dissecting planes and layers, those initial foundations become acquainted with other forms or gestures, but still they never quite reach the cohesion of a solidly particular entity or recognizable site. 

The process of layering, meticulously combining fragmentary motifs alongside and on top of one another in abstract union, owes much to the action of collage, using permutations of thickness, colour and texture as relative components. For example, in the horizontal work Somewhere Else, Someplace Good, a light and scrubby applied layer of light blush becomes an unlikely support for a host of forms, each treated individually with varying painterly styles. An incongruous sugary pink and yellow vertical strip to the right suggests a reflective light glare from an unknown source, whilst the structured edges of an adjacent, large earthy form give way to more expressive, glaze-like washes within its interior. Other hardline irregular shapes above and below become windows which harbour stormy grey seas or skies, and atop it all, dominating the foreground, is a thickly applied bouncing ‘m’ of strong blue, in which the traces of stiff bristle lines make for a satisfying textural detail. The work is a combination of painterly language, colour and form that should not work within one vista, and yet, here it does. Kiernander harnesses an appearance of relative aesthetic harmony, a sensibility that can be traced back to his early studies in illustration and design, which, although not necessarily something he consciously draws upon, is evidently subconsciously buried and intuitively available. 

Using both acrylics and oils side by side, Kiernander exploits their subtle differences in paint handling and texture. Loose washes, created by flooding medium into the paint, allow for undulating depths of colour and a freeing looseness of application. Often these washes will bleed together, or act as dusky screens through which to see further motifs beneath. These are then juxtaposed with hard-edged geometric shapes and lines, which, without solid root, appear as suspended scaffolds from which other gestures may hang. There is frequent use throughout the works of taping or masking in order to create strong angles and structure, but these are combined with the slightness of hand-rendered linear edges, which act as a softening agent and challenge the eye to discern between the two. Colour is for the most part intuitively applied, and often recurs from one canvas to the next, as do certain brush stroke gestures and motifs. This can be attributed to Kiernander’s approach of working on multiple paintings at any given time, and results in a feeling of coherent conversation between the works, despite their wide-ranging size and varying orientations.

As with all contemporary abstract painting, a variety of elements within Kiernander’s oeuvre visually recall movements or artists past. Certainly some homage to Helen Frankenthaler is evident in his use of gestural colour washes, a touch of Kandinsky’s Suprematism in the free-floating collage-like use of forms and their ultimate visual unity. There is even something of a traditional oriental painting feel to All of This and Then, with its use of jade green, coral pink and almost calligraphic watery black brush strokes, but again, resolute or fixed references are elusive. Kiernander is working with fragments of fragments, glimpses of sights, nods to painterly history, but configuring them into something all his own.

It is perhaps unsurprising that the concept of the remix is central to Kiernander’s modus operandi. Brought up in the prime era of electronic music and hip-hop, and with a background as a DJ, the notion of combining and reworking elements from many genres and sources, eluding specific time and place, can just as easily be applied to his paintings as to his musical interests. Song titles or lyrics frequently find their way into his painting and exhibition titles, evocative as they are of memories of time and place. It is surely no coincidence that This Must Be the Place is also the name of a Talking Heads song with the refrain “home, is where I want to be.” 

In terms of the wider source material on which he draws, Kiernander is a perpetual collector. His phone camera has become an ever-present recording device through which to capture the play of a shadow, a color combination, the flick of a logo, the edge of a building. Inspiration often abounds in the most unlikely of places. Digital photography, therefore, forms an important part of his production process, although he doesn’t necessarily look back at the imagery he has taken in order to directly influence a work. Instead he speaks of photography as a tool through which to commit something to memory. Using mental recall rather than working directly from the photographs aids in the natural abstraction of these sources, which then inform the gestures and forms that float upon, splash across or graphically dissect his compositions. Kiernander’s mental archive also negates any kind of cultural hierarchy. A piece of trash might hold as much weight as a building elevation. There is likewise little distinction between digital sources and ‘real life’ sources. He cites stills from Netflix, the juxtaposition of windows on a computer screen and .jpeg thumbnails as visuals that have been later transfigured into his compositions. If anything, the slew of digitally available images now at our fingertips, in addition to the barrage of visual bombardment encountered in our physical lives, has just opened up whole new realms of formal possibility. 

With this in mind, and having explored the physical experiences and processes that inform Kiernander’s paintings, it is interesting to consider their relationship to the virtual. In many ways the painted medium appears as its very antithesis, rooted in hand-rendered physicality. And yet, reaching back as far as the pursuit of mathematically constructed perspective in the Renaissance, its practitioner’s attempts to create illusions of space and depth also situate painting strangely, comfortably, within virtual discourse. As Rosalind Krauss so eloquently notes: “Almost from the first, painters imagined piercing the “luminous concreteness” of the canvas by likening it to a window, the view both opening the picture surface and returning depth to its plane.” [iii] It is evident that Kiernander, by taking traditional means of creating perspective and treating them materially as tropes to be deconstructed and reconfigured, is endeavouring to reach beyond this perceived ‘window’ and into a more expanded and boundless domain. It is also pertinent to note that the semantics of the word ‘window’, re-appropriated for the computer age, can now just as readily be allied with a screen-based entity, offering the endless ‘viewing’ potential that Kiernander has more recently begun to exploit. Aesthetically, his non-linear, multi-layered aesthetic compositions, alluding to a litany of sources and styles, could be construed as visualizing the chaotic nature of cyberspace with its seemingly infinite abundance of information and interconnected perspectives.

And so, as much as they are rooted in tangibility, Kiernander’s canvases, with their simulation of space and devolution of source, can also be regarded as a series of abstract interfaces – a term that holds currency both within the physical and the digital – and which seems apt to delineate the meeting point of disparate and varied influential elements, offering a sense of coherent dialogue but without prescribing affixed meaning. The notion of approaching Kiernander’s paintings with an archaeological eye is just as applicable in light of these intangible, virtual correlations; indeed another term most regularly associated with online existence and digital media is  a user’s ‘history’. It is evident, through the painterly interfaces presented in Event Horizon, loaded with residual fragments filtered from Kiernander’s own wide-reaching and long formed ‘search history’, that he is beginning to master a sense of spatial equilibrium and discover that elusive ‘place’ he has been seeking for so long. 

[i] Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press; Reprint edition (April 1, 1994), P.61

[ii] http://www.architectural-review.com/archive/reputations/alison-smithson-1928-1993-and-peter-smithson-1923-2003/8625631.fullarticle - accessed 10/05/16

[iii] Rosalind Krauss, Under Blue Cup (MIT Press; 2011), P.106

[rebeccatraviswriting]

Kiernander’s paintings offer an abstract exploration of space and site, of shifting sands, fleeting forms – an impermanent, unfixed narrative reflective of both a personal quest for physical and mental space and an interconnected, fast-paced world which offers a limitless stream of possible source material.