Aaron Aujla and Matt Kenny at COOPER COLE

Artists: Aaron Aujla and Matt Kenny

Exhibition title: Interiors

Venue: COOPER COLE, Toronto, Canada

Date: December 18, 2015 – January 16, 2016

Photography: images copyright and courtesy of the artist and COOPER COLE, Toronto

COOPER COLE is pleased to announce the opening of ‘Interiors’, an exhibition by Aaron Aujla and Matt Kenny, both artists first in Toronto.

With ‘Interiors’ Aaron Aujla and Matt Kenny investigate the act of observation through a variety of surrogates. Together they address the constructs of familiarity, cognition, and the limits of language, which result in a series of sculptures and paintings that enlist alternate viewpoints.

Aujla’s sculptures are excerpts from both home remodeling projects and research interviews. Wall works made of Corian present two descriptions of a website by a married couple. A set of twins is asked to describe a stranger’s childhood pet. Countertops from homes of divorcees are removed, replicated, and replaced in a discrete gesture that is a continuation of Aujla’s investigation into personal choice and domestic space. These social exchanges provide a doubling of description that quietly asserts autonomy despite the inextricability of the pairing.

This ‘doubling’ is echoed in Kenny’s paintings that are copies of Georges Braque’s late still life works. Extending his practice of copying signs and film synopsis to canonical paintings, Kenny uses a 1988 Braque monograph to reproduce objects whose inherent character is only implied by photography. Kenny’s attention to Braque’s preoccupations with tactility and bent space play off the limitations of the image he is copying. Using the space in these gaps in reproduction and perception, Kenny’s speculative copies of Braque’s paintings function as both study and tribute.

Aujla and Kenny’s work in quotation advocate the value of re-examination. The artists’ disparate approaches to the failings of description reveal a shared concern for the social and formal implications implicit in perception.

Aaron Aujla (b. 1986, Victoria, Canada) received his BFA from the University of Western, Canada in 2006. His work has been shown internationally at such galleries as C L E A R I N G and Quincaillerie Vander Eycken, Brussels, Belgium; Carlier Gebauer, Berlin, Germany; Paradise Row, London, UK; Art: Concept, Paris, France; Brand New Gallery, Milan, Italy; Steve Turner Contemporary, Los Angeles, USA; The Journal, Brooklyn. USA; and Martos, New York, USA. Aujla currently lives and works in New York, USA.

Matt Kenny (b. 1979, Kansas City, USA) received his BFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2001. His work has been shown internationally, at such galleries as V1 Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark; Galleria Alessandra Bonomo, Rome, Italy; White Flag Projects, St. Louis, USA; Halsey McKay Gallery, East Hampton, USA; and The National Exemplar, 55 Gansevoort, Karma, James Fuentes Gallery, New York, USA. In 2011, his artist book Feelings of Control was published through Karma, New York. Kenny currently lives and works in New York, USA.