Matt’s Gallery presents Psychobotanical, an exhibition of new work by Dean Kenning. The exhibition is accompanied by a specially commissioned essay by John Roberts.

For the 3x3x3 metre gallery space at 92 Webster Road, Kenning plans to extend and tumefy an on-going series of sculptural pieces, which feature throbbing plant-like protuberances. Encircling this motorised work the gallery’s walls will play host to an assembly of the artist’s diagrams and other text-based graphic works.

Utilising cast silicon and possessed of an uncanny inhuman vitalism, Kenning’s kinetic artworks provoke a mixture of fascination, amusement and slight disgust. They appear simple and rudimentary like children’s toys, while also being fleshy like horror film props or something more adult-oriented. The works reference both a lineage of avant-garde sculpture and a parallel line of subcultural horror fiction and filmmaking.

Kenning’s diagrams adopt an idiosyncratic method of philosophical reading and exposition, subjectively inhabiting and illuminating concepts and ideas. Objects and terms are brought into relation through a materialist process that in seeking to address certain problems manifests new ones. Psycho-social schemas are rendered in fleshy logic with mutable, jointed segments.