Articles and Reviews
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2023 "Let There Be War" essay by Karen Jelenfy

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2022 "Kenny Cole’s Savage Menagerie" The Free Press (Vol. 38 No. 41 P. 12) HiLo Art review by Alan Crichton

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2021 "Santa's Hands and Uncle Sams" The Free Press (Vol. 37 No. 47 P.1 & 6) review by Ethan Andrews

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2018 "Indigestion" Portland Press Herald review by Dan Kany

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2017 "Lines of Thought" Portland Press Herald review by Dan Kany

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2016 "The Promise of Tomorrow" Republican Journal review by Ethan Andrews

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2016 "Like There's No Tomorrow" and "The Promise of Tomorrow" Pen Bay Pilot review by Kay Stephens

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2015 "Flood" Seasick Magazine / Hurricane season issue review by Narciso Philistratus

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2014 Artvoices Magazine 7th Annual Winter Basel Issue interview by Ellen Caldwelll

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2014 "Parabellum" Portland Press Herald review by Dan Kany

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2014 "Parabellum" Art New England review by Carl Little

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2014 "Parabellum" Portland Press Herald review by Bob Keyes

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2014 "Parabellum" Artscope review by Suzanne Volmer

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2013 "Distress" interview by Lisa Agostini

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2012 "CMCA Biennial Exhibition" Artscope review by Suzanne Volmer

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2012 "As High As Heaven" catalogue essay by Freddy LaFage and Karen McDonald

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2011 "Gold, God, Guns and Girls" catalogue essay by Nicholas Schroeder

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2010 "The Hellfire Story" Portland Phoenix review by Nicholas Schroeder

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2010 "The Hellfire Story" catalog essay by Al Crichton

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1997 "Cole’s work is neither carefree nor innocent" The Waldo Independent hi-lo review by Alan Crichton

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1995 “The Road to Hell is Paved with Good Intentions” The Waldo Independent hi-lo art review by Alan Crichton

Books and Catalogues
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2022 "Low Energy: Strata Works 1992-2022"

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2021 "Jacked" supplemental image catalog to exhibition

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2021 "Tumult" Image catalog of new work on Xuan paper

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2021 "The 5 Stages of Grief" Handmade chapbook from Staring Problem Press (Out of Print...but contact me if you would like a copy!)

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2020 "W.T.H.J.H.?" image catalogue with essay

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2013 "Distress" image catalog with interview

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2012 "As High As Heaven" image catalogue with essay

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2011 "Darfur at Our Doorstep" image catalog

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2011 "Gold, God, Guns and Girls" image catalogue with essay

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2010 "The Hellfire Story" image catalogue with essay

Selected Website Listings
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Fall 2021 Maine Arts Journal: UMVA Quarterly partnering with the statewide initiative Freedom & Captivity. I contributed an essay and images

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2019 Interview/blog post with "Gallery Closed" artists, Kenny Cole, Geoff Hargadon, Paula Lalala and Brian Reeves

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2016 "The Promise of Tomorrow" Republican Journal review by Ethan Andrews

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2015 "Flood" The Chart review by Jeffrey Ackerman

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2014 "Monhegan: The Unfailing Muse" review by Britta Konau

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2014 "Parabellum" Portland Press Herald review by Dan Kany

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2014 "Parabellum" Portland Press Herald review by Bob Keyes with video

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2009 Thoughts by "The Owl Who Laughs" Poet Chris Crittenden's blog

Seasick Magazine

(Hurricane season issue)

 Vico…Joyce. Mcluhan…Cole.

 

By Narciso Philistratus

“Flood: From Noah to Babel and Beyond” is an obsessive installation of more that 319 gouache drawings by artist Kenny Cole, at Buoy Gallery, in Kittery Maine. The drawings are text pieces, painted words. The result is literally a flood of words, and I do mean “literally”, literally. The texts weave together, using no logical system, the Biblical text of the flood story and a 30,000-word comment stream, following a Yahoo! news article, about the vanishing Moken Sea Nomads of Southeast Asia.

 My first visit to the show, on a mid-week afternoon, found the doors to the gallery locked and the space unattended. On several subsequent visits, all during standard gallery hours, I encountered the same conditions. On my fifth try, I decided to walk around the building and view the show through the windows, several of which were open, and through the locked glass doors. It suddenly struck me that this was how the show was meant to be viewed. Brilliant!

 This unique presentation meant that the texts could not be easily read with the naked eye. Were they meant to be? Our dilemma when facing text art is; do we read it all in order to fully comprehend it; or do we enjoy it as a visual spectacle, sample some of the writing randomly, and come away with a general sense, an intuition, of what is going on. The sheer amount of writing in this piece helps to free the viewer from any sense of obligation to read it all; only a fool would attempt that. On my sixth visit, I brought a pair of binoculars so I could read it all.

 Not knowing the correct order, I decided to begin facing east (like a Mediaeval Church or perhaps to face the Moken Sea Nomads) and read the pieces top to bottom and then clockwise around the room. It made no apparent sense. I then decided on a nonsensical order; south wall, tenth row in, third from top, proceed counter-clockwise, skipping every fifth row, then reversing direction to fill in what I missed. I confess that I may have missed some drawings and read some twice (or more) but it all began to fall into place.

 The effect of the work, whether one reads its contents or not, is of an analogue for the digital onslaught that our devices connect us to on a daily basis (the gallery is also littered with wood, dummy smart phones). It is a common trope to say we are bombarded by images but we are also flooded with an unstoppable stream of words, adding to the existing oceans of writing we will never have time to explore. Do we actually read the text of the Bible and attempt to make first hand sense of this mysterious document, at the creative center of Western Culture, or do we float along on the 30,000 word comment stream, of half formed thoughts tossed off in a rage by amateur thinkers, relating to an article we will soon forget. I suspect most of us will choose the latter, and I often do.

 “Flood” brings to mind other mad, imaginative attempts in Western cultural history to comprehensively deal with the phenomena of language; Marshal McLuhan’s “The Guttenberg Galaxy”, James Joyce’s “Finnegan’s Wake”, and Gianbattista Vico’s “New Science”.

 The biblical flood figures prominently in Vico’s theory about language. Vico, the 18th century Neapolitan philosopher, was the Marshal McLuhan of the enlightenment age. In an age when science could be narrative, he tells a fantastic story about the evolution of human culture, institutions and language, that illustrates how our current mode of language and thinking came to dominate human thought and letters. Vico begins his story after the flood in the age of giants, when our giant ancestors lived according to their animal nature. Lightning struck and the thunderclap of Zeus terrified these giants and in their terror they invented the laws of matrimony so that the lineage of their offspring would be known. As a result, the first families were created. It is from these families that civilization emerges. If this gross condensation makes this story sound a little ridiculous, the long form fills in some details but is far crazier. To Vico the history of human society is cyclical but these recurrent cycles are divided into three phases of civilization each with their corresponding type of language; religious/ hieroglyphic, mythic/poetic, and vulgar/analytic. “Flood” is an amalgam of all three.

 “Finnegan’s Wake”, was the result of Joyce’s obsession with Vico, and like the “Wake”, “Flood” is cyclical; one can start and stop anywhere, or not stop anywhere. One can also find it very satisfying to read both of these works piecemeal, re-read some parts and skip others, and plot a meandering path through the texts unique to the individual reader/viewer.

 McLuhan, oft quoted and seldom read, was a Joyce scholar and many of his insights into media and language come from his careful reading of the “Wake”.  In “The Guttenberg Galaxy”, McLuhan traces the history of media from spoken word, through manuscript and movable type, up to radio and television. He explores how each media effects the cognitive style and world-view of the ages they dominate and would have had much to say about the present day Internet. Though “Flood” seems to suggest the barrage of digital content of our present age, it is actually (literally) a throwback to the hand-painted manuscript. In fact the flood story survives in our culture, not only in movable type, printed books, but also written by hand in the Hebrew Torah, and in this form is read annually in the Sabbath service. This performance piece is a surviving relic of manuscript culture. “Flood” suggests it could also be read in this manner; say six panels every Saturday morning, over the course of a year.

 All art is mimetic in some sense. In this way “Flood”, the “Wake”, the works of Vico and McLuhan, the Torah, all resemble the world in scope and complexity. Few of us will make it through any of these works in their entirety, none through all. But like the world, these works contain in their parts, elements of the whole; patterns and forms of the macrocosm repeat in the microcosm. The parts we choose to scrutinize, contemplate and weave into our own streams of thought will become part of the microcosmic universe that we each create for ourselves. Each life is a sentence in some cosmic text or a knot in the cosmic tapestry.

 

 

Correction: I have been informed by BUOY that their hours are from 5 – 9 pm Tuesday through Saturday, and had I come at those times I could have seen the show from inside the space as “it was meant to be seen”. I stand by my comments.

 

2015 "Flood" Seasick Magazine / Hurricane season issue review by Narciso Philistratus