Last Year, Lost Year
John Kane
and
Infodemic
David Rainbird
April 10 – May 16, 2021
on view day and night at Bushel: Response Space
106 Main Street, Delhi NY
slideshow photos: Heather Phelps Lipton, except first image (Nick George / James Concannon) and final image (Mina Takahashi)
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Our new ResponseSpace exhibition brings together records of two distinct methods for processing the events of 2020. Last Year, Lost Year is a two-part sequential exhibition. Part one (on view through the end of April) featured a recreation of Johnny Kane’s Covid Depression Den. The artifacts inside were collected all over the country over the course of five years. The photographs were taken on 35 mm film in Arizona and South Florida. Alex P Dyck, Shawnee Miller and James Concannon contributed paintings, drawings and collages. Halfway through the show, Jonny replaced the den with a painting of “The Tramp” on his way to enjoy warm pie from “Ma” who is widowed and has lost her daughter to cholera. According to Johnny, “Ma” has baked a pie once a month for 24 years, and enjoys the familial bond with this prodigal young dude. The painting captures the weird return to a new reality that though sweet and strangely familiar, is anything other than normal. Infodemic: The story of the pandemic in headlines is David Rainbird’s response to the question, “Can the story of the pandemic be told in 366 headlines?” Taking to heart WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus’s statement, “We’re not just fighting an epidemic; we’re fighting an infodemic,” David Rainbird started to collect headlines about the 2020 pandemic as an attempt to make sense. The project is both a memorial and an attempt to answer the question “How did we get here?”
John Kane is a multidisciplinary artist currently based in Kingston, NY. His work focuses mostly on the indignity of day to day life under capitalism and the slow decay of American Iconography. He loves fishing and old trucks and all his friends. Shawnee Miller, Alex P Dyck, and James Concannon are his dear friends and collaborators. They live and work together in a big scary house in the woods. Their work can be viewed on Instagram, @fallow.ochre, @yokosnoopy, @jamesconcannonart respectively.
David Rainbird is a creative director living in Margaretville, NY.
This exhibition is made possible in part with funds from the Delaware County Arts Grants, a regrant program of the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature and administered in Delaware County by the Roxbury Arts Group.