Kristan Kennedy and Marcus Fischer: In Sun
NOON Projects
April 17\u2013May 30, 2026
Los Angeles<\/p>\n
I had a funny moment outside NOON Projects in Los Angeles as I realized where this exhibition\u2019s title came from. The street itself is bathed in sunlight courtesy of a long east-bound walkway and good old California weather, but that\u2019s not it. The truth is that the small gallery on Chung King Road used to belong to \u201cWIN SUN COMPANY Jade & Jewelry,\u201d before the W fell off. Just about everything with this exhibition, a duet between Portland-based artists Kristan Kennedy and Marcus Fischer, emerges from a profound sense of coincidence and circumstance, both within Kennedy and Fischer\u2019s highly intentional explorations of duration and resilience and in ways, like the sign, that could only be attributed to forces beyond our control. The result is a deft balance of open-armed playfulness and careful obfuscation, companionship and vulnerability, magnified by an honest awareness of the works\u2019 inevitable fragility.<\/p>\n
Kennedy\u2019s paintings, all from 2026, begin on unstretched linen before being put through a painterly gauntlet: they\u2019re dyed, stained with clarified butter, drawn-on, and thrown through the laundry in any order as many times as is necessary to create a hypnotic sense of pre-existence that\u2019ll ring familiar to punks and wooks in the room as evocative of a well-worn touring garment. In the cluster to the gallery\u2019s immediate left, the 30-by-24-inch S.N.I.S.W.T. stitches a multicolored back patch to a ring of near-brutalist grey strokes, while the smaller I.N.S.T.D.T.Y.H.M.M.D. frames bleached white splotches like half-painted easter eggs atop a frayed pocket of McDonald\u2019s yellow on scratched-up indigo. In the low-hung, vertically-barred T.E.A.O.O.T., woozy umber dye spots form micro-images evocative of wood knots or, in the bottom middle, what really looks (to me) to be the beady-eyed ghost of a tiny dog. Kennedy\u2019s acronymized titling scheme is at once perplexing and inviting. Some are immediately phonetic, like the sine-waved showstopper K.S.N.G.P.N.T.G., or the shooting stars of N.W.S.N.G., while others, such as the looping S.M.O.T.G.O.V., or back-office work W.N.D.T.B.O.V.G.R.S., are complex and near inscrutable. While the gallery keeps a secret title codex for collectors, I think there\u2019s an immense amount of fun to be had in coming up with one\u2019s own, or better yet, letting their mysteries be.<\/p>\n
Soundtracking and grounding the exhibition is Kennedy\u2019s longtime friend, first time collaborator, and 12k Records artist, Marcus Fischer. His Memory Gates (2026) is a recursive ceiling-suspended tape loop comprised of two linked reel-to-reel machines with faint-blue and transparent-yellow acrylic discs. They orbit each other like celestial bodies and sway as the nearby gallery door opens. The sound, four channels spread via Fischer\u2019s tour-worn speaker drivers mounted at various points between Kennedy\u2019s paintings (a sort of punctuation that dispels any starchy white-wall pretexts) is somewhere between euphoric sound-bath and natural field recordings, a contrast to Fischer\u2019s wall-of-sound approach to improvisational live performance. At any point moving back and forth, you might catch a bird song or a new overtone in one ear, then the other, to quadraphonic effect. When looking at Memory Gates, you\u2019re also looking through the window it faces, the long strands of tape heart-framing those sitting on the bench immediately outside or catalyzing any number of eye-contact moments with passersby; where this kind of music is often enjoyed in spite of other people, here there\u2019s an immense satisfaction as they appear. Tiny flakes of iron oxide\u2014rust, a key component in magnetic tape\u2014gently fall off the loop to the top of the recorder as it continuously spins throughout the show\u2019s run, physically evoking William Basinski\u2019s The Disintegration Loops but affecting the sound in far subtler ways thanks to Fischer\u2019s emphasis on evolution over decay. In two framed works, This is the Sound of Where the River Meets the Sea (2026) and This is the Sound of Night in the Foothills (2026), Fischer makes sound secondary to the tape loop itself\u2014free to satisfyingly flop about as the frame is hung from several orientations\u2014granting a physical body to his questions of tape as instrument, artistic material, and means of data storage. A video work on the far back wall, On Belonging (2025\u201326) removes tape from the equation and hits us with pure data, blending Fischer\u2019s field recordings and real-world trail cam footage into bright washes of night-vision blue on the skies of Oregon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Kristan Kennedy and Marcus Fischer: In Sun NOON ProjectsApril 17\u2013May 30, 2026 Los Angeles I had a funny…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":242239,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[1149,3458,3457,3459,3456,2878,98,3461,3462,100,99,3455,17,1117,3465,749,2538,9,3463,24,63,3460,3464,905],"class_list":["post-242238","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brooklyn","tag-art","tag-art-books","tag-art-critic","tag-art-reviews","tag-artists","tag-books","tag-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn-art","tag-brooklyn-culture","tag-brooklyn-headlines","tag-brooklyn-news","tag-contemporary-art","tag-culture","tag-dance","tag-fiction","tag-film","tag-music","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-art-scene","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-phong-bui","tag-poetry","tag-theater"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242238","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=242238"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242238\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/242239"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=242238"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=242238"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=242238"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}