Kevin Malcolm
Decorative Border
KANT
St. Kongensgade 3, Baghuset
1264 Copenhagen K
Denmark
1264 Copenhagen K
Denmark
31. January - 7. March 2015
Tuesday - Friday 12.00 - 18.00
Saturday 11.00 - 16.00
Saturday 11.00 - 16.00
Courtesy Kevin Malcolm & KANT
Photo Karen Boheoj
Decorative border, Malcolm's first solo exhibition at the gallery, features new prints and sculptural works from
his ongoing project Outremer, started in 2013. With a focus on printed media and its role in the storage and
communication of knowledge, Malcolm's work explores the tensions between image and source. Encompassing
sculpture, photography, collage and works which fall somewhere between these definitions, his practice
questions the construction and display of visual information and how this affects our experience of culture,
place and history. Outremer -literally ‘beyond the sea’- is a body of work which investigates tangible aesthetic
and conceptual connections between art production, museum display, industrialization and colonialism.
The exhibition includes a selection from a series of 42 silkscreen prints on found photogravures in which
European cultural heritage and colonial history are problematized through an engagement with photographs of
Cambodian art objects from the Musée Guimet in Paris. The museum houses the collection of Asian art amassed
by the 19th Century industrialist and traveller Emile Guimet whose fortune was made in the production of
synthetic ultramarine pigment, invented in 1826 by his father, a chemist. The motifs of the original
photogravures are partially obscured with pigment in a considered process of redaction which activates the
suggestive and formal potentialities of these found images while interrupting and recontextualising how they
might be read. Alongside the prints several new sculptural works respond to display architectures and their
rhetorical strategies, incorporating disparate images and objects in an expanded collage suggesting a web of
connections.
The works in Decorative Border continue Malcolm's use of image-based research as a generative environment
for the production of nuanced and associative works which are open and inconclusive, rich with content while
avoiding a prescriptive or didactic expression. This exhibition, as with his practice as a whole, questions the
production and presentation of art and activates discourse around accepted knowledge and visual culture.