New York, NY - My Pet Ram is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new paintings by Debbi Kenote entitled Fire Followers, on view from October 11 to November 10, 2024.

Kenote’s digressive canvases, often hinged, closing in on themselves, diabolically constructed of angular shaped stretchers, and painted on both sides, began their evolution in design using quilting blocks as aesthetic framework. Quilting blocks are the elements in a quilt that repeat throughout, delivering the systematic rigidity of pattern and have been institutionalized as a hallmark of decoration in the domicile. These blocks work as a paronymous framework across the tradition of quilting in American and European contexts and were first implemented to make working easier and more compact. Kenote’s stretchers operate similarly. Although the works for this exhibition may not directly use quilting blocks as square one, a quilt-like logic and decorative equation is ever present. Kenote expands that rote format arriving at an affect both bluntly camped in decoration and sharply contemporary, painting forward, with sculpture in the wings; often gleaning art historical sensibility from the greats as much as from their contemporary ricochets.

Fire Followers, Kenote’s most holistic body of work to date, is conceptualized around cataclysm and her personal experience with grief. Anyone who’s ever lost someone close knows that the stabbing disreality of loss comes in pangs, is easily triggered, and never truly goes away. Coping is a strength grown in days. Everything keeps changing though. With change comes lenses, avenues to see past, avenues to see anew, to see through memory, and experience new ways of loving across time. This is how the holes in Kenote’s paintings seem to function, like a memorial and a prism.

The new paintings in Fire Followers are hopeful, and the title is descriptive of the sentiment. Fire followers are the species of plants that first emerge after wildfire, often nitrogen fixers, and the birds that help to populate them. Each work in this exhibition has a duality to it expressive of levity and decimation. Each work is named and designed after one of these special agents of change, of forestial metempsychosis.

Whispering Bells and Interrupted Elfcup both use void space to envision loss not as a period, but as an opening, propelling and begging for a future with an affect dainty and swift that also feels difficult to move around. To see them is necessary in order to move through them. Interrupted Elfcup is painted on both sides and the visible elements of the stretchers accentuate the composition with their design. When its doors are flung open the gesture is wildly expressive of vacated space, boldly.

Fireweed is gracefully emotional and commanding of its art nouveau influences. Its angular profile channels the forms of nature crystallizing them into architecture. The mottled crimson dye gives the work its personality and justifies its name while providing an atmosphere of color both timid and alluring. The work when opened becomes staggeringly more complex. Nowhere else is the stretcher design so proudly part of the composition, either. When closed, Fireweed reads as a locket holding a clandestine sliver of truth, when opened this truth is multiplied and made whole revealing an internal scaffold of paint and wood devised to work together in ornamentation. The surprise in the opening is novel but indivisible. Here the stretcher amplifies the depth of the picture plane collapsing the conventions of painting in on themselves, only to unfold again. Kenote has figured out how to make a painting act like a folded paper fortune teller. They appear as sculptures, their configuration can be manipulated, each manipulation offers a difference of appearance, take their answers as you may.

- Jack Arthur Wood, excerpted from Memorial as Prism, an original essay published in tandem with this exhibition.

Fire Followers will be on view beginning Friday, October 11 through Sunday, November 10, 2024. The gallery is located at 48 Hester Street in the Lower East Side. Gallery hours are Thursday-Sunday from 12-6pm and by appointment. For more information, please email info@mypetram.com.