Daily Art Moment: Arnold Kemp

Years previously to making this work, I met Lee Ranaldo and Kim Gordon of the band Sonic Youth. Ranaldo introduced his music to me by inviting me to a concert the band was giving in Boston. The band’s 1988 album “Daydream Nation” became a beautiful, resolute, and illuminating source of inspiration. I sought to sustain this feeling with a daily practice of painting and drawing that also was related to my reimagining of the political landscape of the US.

—Arnold Kemp

Kemp balances the symbolic and the concrete in this drawing in compelling ways. The solid blocks of black and white color might read as a formalist abstraction. However, the two forms stand in opposition and they evoke idioms (black-and-white), binaries (black, white), and as Kemp asserts, a metaphor for social and political forces like partisanship and race relations in the United States. By borrowing the title “Daydream Nation,” Kemp is describing a country “deluded by wistful fantasy,” as critic John Motley writes. For me, the narrow strip of unpainted paper between the two shapes is also powerfully suggestive and meaningful.

—Sara Krajewski, The Robert and Mercedes Eichholz Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art