Kenny Deprez, My Every Day, Philadelphia Sketch Club

“In July I am exhibiting in the Stewart Room, at The Philadelphia Sketch Club. My work explores time and place through photography and painting. I am interested in image making that reveals my experience in the everyday, and extends the process of making to the everyday. I will be showing for the first time a body of work that consists of a gridded arrangement of 12 x 12” photo-based paintings of my daily travels around Philadelphia. I will also debut an ongoing photo-journalistic project of my wife’s family farm (The Hayford Farm, of Pittston, Maine).” – Kenny Deprez

Kenny Deprez, My Every Day, Philadelphia Sketch Club

Kenny Deprez‘ solo art show, My Every Day, in the Stewart Room of The Philadelphia Sketch Club is cool hybrid photography, blatantly manipulated, enlivening the historic game room gallery with a modern sensibility. Kenny and DoN chatted at the opening reception held in concert with PHOTOgraphy 2013, the juried photography show, about the logistics of putting on a big solo show.

“Some of the work here goes as far back as 2008, that is where this whole series started. The painting on my photographs. Before that I was primarily a sculptor, video artist slash performance artist. And then this work, photography, sort of presented a way to continue somehow video-graphy or perform in my work. Like, I’m still in charge of the camera and the viewpoint.”

Kenny Deprez, My Every Day, Philadelphia Sketch Club

So you think of photography as performance?

“In some ways it’s performance based but it allows me to just make the work everyday. First, it allows me to move my work to the studio or to a gallery space where it becomes more isolated. Here I can work on the ideas every day. The photographs I take, where I’m taking the photographs and then going into painting and painting them, it becomes more of the hand being at work.”

Kenny Deprez, My Every Day, Philadelphia Sketch Club

The collection of photographs arranged formally on the gallery wall reads cinematically like a story board. Each photograph contains a separate narrative of time and place but together the images read like a graphic novel.

“I guess I was thinking, sort of, about the microcosm of this space that I’ve gone to a lot over the last eight years, I keep returning to that space and watch how it changes. It’s the Hayford Family Farm, my wife’s family farm, and some of the shots are really formal and some are more playful, some of them show the changes of a site that’s been re-visited over and over again. Some are just happenstance like the cat who runs into the photo. The arrangement reflects the microcosm aspect of it. It’s like a circle, like the whole world can exist there.”

Kenny Deprez, My Every Day, Philadelphia Sketch Club

What inspires you to paint on the photographs?

“I guess I’ve never really felt comfortable as a photographer. So this was a way to continue to engage with the photo and figure out the next level. Traditionally I’m a sculptor, so this is a way to think of them as an object, a way to put my hands on it.

The show is called My Every Day and that has a lot to do with the things I see every day of my life. It’s personal in that way but I hope that somehow it’s not just about me. It’s more about like that art doesn’t have to be totally removed from our every day experience.” – Kenny Deprez

Kenny Deprez, My Every Day, Philadelphia Sketch Club throughout July, Gallery hours: Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday: 1 PM to 5 PM.

Written and photographed by DoN Brewer except where noted.

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