SaveArtSpace: Your Art New York

Ken Lavey is a lens based artist and technician in New York City. He holds a BFA from the School of Visual Arts and was a resident artist at the Royal College of Art in London. He was a winner of Surface Magazine Avant Guardian competition in 2015. His photographs have been featured by Vice, A New Nothing, The Latent Image, and others. He has exhibited as part of Mary Mary Projects in 2017, Miami Project 2016, International Photo Festival Leiden 2015, Photoville 2015, Photo L.A. 2015 and others.

Ken's work was installed on advertisement space during the first week of August 2017 at Bushwick Ave & Jefferson St (611 Bushwick Ave) Brooklyn, NY 11206.

Artist Statement:

This work comes from the kind of ultra male spaces that I have been photographing for years. Hardware stores, garages, second-hand electronics stores, the ubiquitous junk drawer. These places are especially fertile ground. The primary decision in making these compositions is determining the object’s ideal view. Which way should these objects point themselves? Should it be looked at from the front? From behind? In what direction should its extremities protrude? Does it matter which is the front or which is the back? These decisions allow the objects to be fully described, and to establish interesting resemblances and associations.

What color could complicate things? What kind of textures and surfaces could be in conversation with the subject? I consider what other objects I have, and how their interactions can create evocative combinations. How can I use space and light? These decisions emphasize and confuse the thing’s function and scale. The work is nourishing and debauched. The photographs transform these unexpected objects, their original use is obscured. They’re new. These things are freed from the confines of their original purpose and interpretation.

Special Guest Curator: Efrem zelony-mindell