Eddie Kennedy in ARTnews, March 2010

Review
By Mona Molarsky

Framed by painted borders, Eddie Kennedy's canvases are like weathered country windows opening onto misty places. Thick white impastos laid over thin blues, chartreuses, and terracottas suggest dense fog or snowbanks obscuring lush lanscapes beyond. Here and there, dabs of yellow, green, and violet conjure half-buried flowers, decaying leaves, or spongy moss. Sometimes a horizon asserts itself, or a streaky blue stip evokes water. But lest we be tempted to connect the works to natural phenomena too literally, hints of a grid pattern often emerge, raising the specter of Mondrian as channeled through the vaporizing spirit of Rothko.

Kennedy Grew up on a dairy farm in County Tipperary, Ireland, and studied art in Limerick before decamping for some years to the United States. Although he has been resettled in Ireland for somet time now, Kennedy manages to cross a New York School sensibility with a country boy's tactile sense of the elements, layering texture on top of texture. We see this in the painting Dazzle (2009), with its pale, cavernous mouthlike void surrounded by expressionstic patterning and gesture.

The Abstract Expressionists tended to favor black and intense color, but Kennedy is more of a minimalist in his tonalities. His work exudes air and light. Like Tom Sawyer painting the proverbial fence, he slathers on the white with a huge wall-painter's brush--creating broad, flat planes that stop us in our tracks. We must peer around the edges or through the cracks to glimpse bits and piceces of a concealed world on the other side. In the end, we are left with the sense that something is going on there, even if we don't know exactly what it is.



Jeffrey Stockbridge in Modern Painters, June 2009

Aesthetics of Dilapidation
By David Grosz

Jeffrey Richard Stockbridge has been photographing abandoned homes in Philadelphia for five years. Now he's taking portraits of the people who live among the ruins.

Jeffrey Richard Stockbridge is trying to move on, but his first major opus won't entirely let him be. The Philadelphia-based photographer came to prominence in 2005, as a runner-up for the New York Times Magazine College Photography Contest, with works from his "Occupied" series, large-scale color pictures of interiors of abandoned houses. Completed a year later and published in book form, the series, along with a related 2007 project, continues to be shown in galleries across the Northeast. This month it can be seen at theJ. Cacciola Gallery in New York.

The 25-year-old Stockbridge, however, is not dwelling on the past. "I've always been aware of all the other factors and issues and relevance that existed around this project," he says. "I began to feel as though I could do this better, I could do this differently." This seems to be exactly what he's done in his latest work, which has yet to be published or exhibited.

The "Occupied" series was born of a combination of precocious artistic ambition and a youthful sense of discovery. Having moved from the Maryland countryside to Philadelphia to study photography at Drexel University, Stockbridge was amazed by a disturbing feature of his new home: the thousands upon thousands of abandoned houses he claims exist in the city. "As a college student, I was skipping around from place to place, moving every year for five years, and I noticed that there were houses that were abandoned in pretty much every neighborhood I lived in. And that intrigued me," he says. Getting into the homes was "remarkably easy. I'd say more than half the time you can walk right in the front door. Some of these properties are not boarded up at all."

Once inside, he had all the time he needed to find his subjects and compose his photographs. Stockbridge worked with a 4x5 viewfinder camera, using only available light. It was a laborious process that involved lugging around a 50-pound camera, carefully setting the lens, and waiting for just the right light, which often meant waiting for hours.

At first glance, the photos seem to promote an aesthetic of dilapidation; they are like a downscale, urban-contemporary take on the modern-day romance with classical ruins. But look closely and you'll notice that something funny is going on with the focus. Stockbridge employs the so-called tilt-shift method, which allows for a selective area of intense focus. A single object -- a bare mattress in the middle of the room, a shaft of light creeping through a crack in a boarded-up window, a gargoyle on a staircase landing -- appears in sharp relief, while everything around it is in a soft haze.

The tilt-shift method has been popularized by photographers such as Olivo Barbieri and Vincent Laforet, who both turn distant aerial shots into what look like views of miniature models. For Stockbridge, it is a way to simulate the moment of discovering a new space. "When I enter a room," he says, "my eye is going to go one place. Right off the bat, it's going to go to the brightest part of the room, or it's going to go to an object of interest in the room. Everything else is sort of out of focus; it's all in my peripheral vision. I wanted to find a way of capturing that feeling, of looking at something but not knowing what else is there yet." His photographs capture the excitement and sense of dislocation associated with discovery. But the effect also toys with the viewer's perception, causing him to question the sense of scale and, Stockbridge hopes, "look deeper and further for meaning."

It is here that the series introduces an element of unresolved tension. Despite their striking beauty, the "Occupied" photos seem torn between Stockbridge's formal and aesthetic ambitions (what he calls "a personal, spiritual understanding of the spaces") and a documentary urge to describe a particular form of urban blight and show what departed inhabitants have left behind. To help achieve this second goal, Stockbridge displays his photos alongside found objects recovered from the homes: bent snapshots and yellowing letters that are meant to tell the story of the erstwhile occupants. Striking documents, or "artifacts" as Stockbridge calls them, they seem to obscure the meaning of the works.

If the "Occupied" series has a weakness, it is this lack of precision. It is not surprising that, as Stockbridge admits, many viewers have confused them for shots of post-Katrina New Orleans. Among the current spate of foreclosures, they are apt to be misread again.

By contrast, precision and clear focus are hallmarks of Stockbridge's more recent work. He still begins with abandoned houses, but his concern is less with formal qualities than the details of the home: the food still in the fridge, or the calendar from 1991 hanging on a wall. Moreover, the project involves more than interior shots and found objects. Stockbridge now provides a much fuller sense of context, including photographs of surrounding neighborhoods and local residents. "If you'd asked me to photograph people while I was doing the original 'Occupied' series, I would have said, 'No way,'" he says. "It was a lot easier to just sneak into abandoned houses and snap these photographs and sneak out; it was more about me being this silent, invisible photographer that moved through all these neighborhoods in Philadelphia that no one knew about. Now my presence is very obvious. When I'm interested in photographing a house, I'll walk up and down the street and introduce myself to anyone that's there."

Stockbridge's portraits are as arresting as his softly lit, boarded-up interiors. He has pictures of people on the street and squatters he's come across inside homes. He's done a series on female addicts who turn to prostitution. In one of the most powerful images, he shows a couple framed by the door of the home they have lived in for 50 years, which abuts an abandoned building whose slow collapse is beginning to bring down their house too. And Stockbridge has done away with the tilt-shift method. These are straight photographs, and they speak with a direct, unwavering voice. Spend some time looking at them and you get the sense that whatever Stockbridge was searching for in abandoned homes, he found it as soon as he stepped out onto the streets.

A selection from the "Occupied" series will be included in a group photography show on view at J. Cacciola Gallery from June 4-30.

A.C. in Blue Bathroom, 36 x 36, oil on panel

Alex Kanevsky in CityArts NYC, May 2009

Alex Kanevsky: Prosperine
by Mario Naves
If a combination of John Singer Sargent, Thomas Eakins and Francis Bacon-- that is to say, unerring expertise, stringent attention to anatomical detail and unseemly isolation-- sounds intriguing, then Alex Kanevksy's paintings fit the bill. His icy dioramas of displaced women supposedly take their inspiration from the Greek myth of Prosperine, but what really matters is an innate knack for oils. Whether he's jabbing, scraping, slathering or dotting, Kanevsky's got the touch-- there ain't nothin'he can't do with the stuff. Like a lot of naturals, Kanevsky is a showoff and, as such, annoying most of the time. But just when you want to give him a dressing down, he sets off sparks--like with the slippery veils of gray and light green halo in "A.C. in Blue Bathroom"--at which point, you don't begrudge his ego, you congratulate him for it.

K.C. 1, oil on mylar, 31x19

Alex Kanevsky in ArtNews, September 2007

Alex Kanevsky paints subjects other than nudes, but nudes are what he does best. He depicts them in a strange and disturbing manner so that his images have a ghostly intensity. In this show of 19 works. all 2006-7, he continued to blur the line between photography and painting, rendering figures in it style that might be described as impressionist realism

Using a palette of pale blues, greens, and grays, Kanevsky mimics the kind of transparency found in Degas' nudes. He conveys an aura of antiquity and, by ex- tension, lends his ordinary figures a remarkable dignity. In K.C. I and K.C. 2--the initials stand for the subject's name--the woman's aging body, described in subtle pink and gray, is presented deadpan, as a fact, and the woman appears to accept herself as she is. Indeed, all the subjects in these paintings--mostly middle-aged women--projected an intriguing nonchalance about them- selves and their bodies.

Especially compelling were a pair of three-panel paintings. In one of them, Parlor Games a woman helps another try on a wedding dress, but more prominent than the women, who arc barely visible, is a big red chair in the nearly empty space. As with Peggy's House, which portrays a bare apartment. Parlor Games seems to be more about the relationship between space and objects than about those between human beings who are an apparent afterthought.

In effect, if not in style, these paintings are reminiscent of some of Edward Hopper's. They tantalize the viewer with the suggestion of a hidden narrative, which they, in turn, elaborate.

-Valerie Gladstone