|
For their upcoming show at Steven Wolf Fine Arts, Kent and Kevin Young surveyed the cultural landscape to further explore their complex sense of being twins. In a series of collages made using images culled from the media they assembled a reflecting pool of twin-fear and twin-fascination and dotted it with lily pads of related doublings: before and after photos of weight loss, tales of identity theft and images of celebrities and their impersonators. When you look at the fear and mystery that surround these tales of identity and identity mistaken it becomes clear that twins threaten conventional notions of individuality and open a door into the study of communal consciousness.
Despite the public focus in this body of work the scrap book aesthetic that organizes the imagery gives rise to the odd feeling that we are looking at personal documents not created for public view. In the past, Kevin and Kent Young have primarily looked inward and tried to make visible their unconventional experience of identity. In one body of work they each made paintings in a signature style—and then swapped styles. In the video Head Games they bounced a soccer ball back and forth from one head to another as though it were a secret thought. And in a performance called A Monozygotic Experiment in Telepathic Conveyance they turned themselves into spectacle by publicly trying to solve a crossword puzzle using only telepathy.
If twin identity hasn't always been the explicit subject of their work it was always lurking in the background. In the spring of 2006, they declared that all the art they produced from that moment on would be designated a collaboration. It didn't matter if the work was conceived or manufactured by just one of the twins because it was in every way a product of their special connection, their ongoing sense of a shared consciousness. Their sense of this link was so strong they even applied the change in attribution retroactively to their previous work, designating themselves a kind of DNA collective in an age of collectives.
For the March 27 opening reception, Steven Wolf Fine Arts invites all SF Bay Area twins to come down and play the Kreskin's ESP game with Kent and Kevin Young. It's a 1960's Milton Bradley game with tests and exercises to gauge your ESP powers.
|
return to artnet.com
