TBA:07 ON SITE

ARNOLD J. KEMP

DAYDREAM NATION (The Suspiria Version)

PICA Artist in Residence Arnold J. Kemp further pursues the psychic and political spaces that are available in abstraction by continuing his ongoing body of work DAYDREAM NATION. Kemp’s works stem from cultural, political and philosophical positions treated primarily from an avant-gardist/leftist orientation and are aimed at disrupting the common reading of abstraction as a refuge from concern. The Suspiria Version has been inspired by Dario Argento’s hallucinatory horror masterpiece of the same name. In the film, a young American becomes trapped in a waking nightmare of the damned. In films such as Suspiria, Kemp sees a darkness in the narrative that echoes the dark spaces within his own work. He sees us living in a dream state—one linked to the very real world that surrounds us.

Arnold J. Kemp is an artist, writer and curator. In 2000 he exhibited a series of drawings in Freestyle at The Studio Museum in Harlem and he has had solo exhibitions at ESP Gallery, The Luggage Store Gallery, Quotidian Gallery, and Stephen Wirtz Gallery in San Francisco. Kemp's work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Studio Museum in Harlem. Kemp’s curatorial projects include, among others: Bay Area Now, Extra Super Meta, Mark Dion: Where the Land Meets the Sea, Rapper’s Delight, Juvenilia and Slow Dive, all presented at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts where Kemp was an Associate Curator from 1993 to 2003.

This project is made possible in part by a grant from the National Performance Network's Visual Artist Network Pilot Program. www.npnweb.org. Major contributors are the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and the Arts Council of New Orleans.

www.worksarnoldjkemp.com

Sponsors:

Sarah & Andrew Meigs