Little Hawk Field

About

 Kevin McNamee-Tweed, while largely unsubscribed to a single artistic medium, currently works primarily in a vein of monotyping. Already an idiosyncratic means of image-production, he has developed and refined techniques to both accentuate and temper the irregularity of the unpredictable process. Drawn, pressed, and incised using a variety of styli and tools, the image is transcribed via a blindness of process where instinct and depth of feel is coagulated into the complexity of composition that comes from works born outside of lens-based media.

The result of such obfuscatory mark-making is a surface quality that is at once raw and mediated. The works enter a liminal space between artefact, blueprint and folklore where a visual language of a familiar civilisation is unearthed, distilled and translated onto surfaces that echo as fragments of a whole. Ladders, road surfaces and depictions of domestic scenes become mysticised and archived through McNamee-Tweed’s process of transcendent depiction.

Accompanying the monotypes are a selection of paintings and ceramic pieces. Austere and restrained, the canvases contrast the image resonance of the rigorous-looking monotypes while echoing their atmosphere and scale. The ceramics, which range from painterly renderings to three-dimensional abstractions, interact with the two-dimensional work both formally and structurally. 

Sourced from his time in Italy, Texas, and Iowa, among other places, Kevin McNamee-Tweed’s pictures carry a sense of intimacy as well as universality. Minced with colloquial and art-historical imagery, the vignettes throughout Little Hawk Field present visceral realities inhabitable by personal histories as well as grandiose cliché.