Kendall Henderson

New York-based artist Kendall Henderson is pleased to present Time Frames, Henderson’s first solo exhibition showing at 81 Leonard Gallery. On view from October 5th through November 18th, 2023, this exhibition presents a spectrum of Henderson’s interdisciplinary practice over the past three years, with each work probing the limits of perception by reframing the manufactured meaning of objects.

Henderson sifts an amalgam of materials that pass through his life, arranging, manipulating, and preserving them in order to reject their original form or perception, while excavating their beauty and painting them into the light of the viewer’s mind. Having spent the last 11 years working in design, his meticulous observation of what compels a person to acquire something and what parts of that thing are deemed significant leads to his decisively subconscious object accumulation. The objects are then laid in proximity to one another, using compositional techniques of repetition, balance, recognition, deconstruction, and distress before preserving the format with an epoxy or pourable cast

Staticity and dynamism work in tandem. At a glance, one might notice a fragment of written language; the next, a reference to a place obscured by currency which has been deconstructed or tucked into a smaller vessel, or a match laid parallel to the transparent frame, in which these multitudes lie in conversation.

Henderson finds particular interest in objects that are a record of experience or interaction, objects that personify growth or time, and objects that were at one point essential in their performance of a function and have since been disregarded after performing that function; such as dried foliage, receipts, packaging, shipping materials, brochures, tickets, used tools, photographs, identification cards, currency, and other life debris.

This progression embraces the paradox of what is distinguishable and the inconceivable point at which it becomes indistinguishable, bringing the viewer to examine the vagueness of life, time and value.

The phrase “I would prefer not to” may be one of the most indelible spoken lines in American literature. The declaration derives its power from giving the slightest impression of hope that Herman Melville’s Bartleby may still fall in line with his fellow employees and do as he is told—thereby softening the true defiance of the statement.

The simple addition of “would” and “prefer” creates a complex scenario where the appropriate answer is not readily available. How does one reply to someone “who would prefer not to” participate in society, follow the perceived “social norms,” and do as they are told or expected? The phrase creates more confusion, frustration, and inner dialogue than outright anger, and forces the person on its receiving end to think rather than merely respond. Had Bartleby instead chosen to use the phrase “F___ you, I won’t do as you tell me”, a repeated lyric in Rage against the Machine’s 1992 song “Killing in the Name,” it would have elicited an immediate response without the same introspection, while also granting a form of justification due to a sense of provocation.

“Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance,” Melville wrote in Bartleby the Scrivener (1853). This exhibition seeks to show the importance that artists have in these times by connecting their work to the same spirit of Bartleby’s repeated line of passive resistance. Like Bartleby, we need artists who “would prefer not to” live by the rules if it means overlooking the injustices, inequities, and failures of our systems and exploring the complexities of the human condition. In these days of media overload and global connectivity, where considered language seems nearly obliterated, there seems to be only reaction and immediate response, then hit send. We need to be made to feel uncomfortable if the end result is that it makes us all think, reconsider, and have true dialogue that results in meaningful action.

2023, Apostrophe, 2023

Group exhibition, Personal Space, Vallejo, California. On view from December 3rd through January 21st, 2023-24.

2023