Conduit Gallery is honored to announce Natural Clock, the first solo exhibition at Conduit Gallery of drawings and glazed ceramic fragments by North Carolina-based artist Kevin McNamee-Tweed.

Kevin McNamee-Tweed’s exhibition Natural Clock considers the theme of Time, how it is constructed, expressed, and asserts itself. In the selection of new drawings and ceramic paintings Time becomes redundant, material, and often absurd. In one ceramic work, a mountainous green landscape shows humans pushing giant clocks up the terrain. In another work, bicyclists pedal around the rings of Saturn. Numerically incoherent clocks of the classic circle with hands design are scattered throughout the body of work. And although the passage of time permeates, many works in the exhibition simply center on narrative scenes such as a bird in a pie cooling on a window sill, or a crashing wave, a butterfly approaching a flower, or a person in an apartment window throwing food to a building-sized seagull.

McNamee-Tweed is interested in the myriad ways humans measure existence. He looks at science, the humanities, and visual culture as metrics for imposing scale and proportion on the unfathomable scope of existence. Put differently, his work looks at meaning-making. Most intimately, his pursuits converge on questions about the nature of aesthetic information, from the art-historical to the commonplace, with special interest in what happens when meanings and contexts become transient. McNamee-Tweed’s imagery often combines narrative drama, depictions of beauty, and emotional saturation. The images and objects he makes derive from a state of play, from fundamental curiosity, and from a continual return to mark-making.

Anchored firmly in the tradition of painting and image-making, his practice often incorporates broad material exploration. In recent exhibitions, for example, he has shown wood relief sculptures, wall-mounted pictorial ceramics, homemade pigment paintings on found fabric, monotypes on handmade paper, functional and marginally-functional objects, artist’s books, and other two and three dimensional mediums. At Conduit Gallery, his first solo exhibition in Dallas, he’s gathered a selection of new drawings and ceramics. The pencil drawings on handmade mulberry paper, a staple in his practice, demonstrate the act of drawing as a thought process and celebrate the mechanics and possibilities of image-making. The technically complex, intimately-sized ceramic works function conventionally as paintings but enjoy heightened corporeality with hand-mixed glazes and clay bodies offering rich surfaces and material presence.

Kevin McNamee-Tweed (b. 1984) is an artist, curator, and writer based in North Carolina. He earned a BFA from New York University and an MA and MFA from The University of Iowa. Regularly working across mediums and disciplines, his practice includes exhibitions, books, and interdisciplinary and collaborative projects. Recent exhibitions include solo shows at Steve Turner (Los Angeles), Rod Barton (London), Devening Projects (Chicago), The Still House Group (New York), and The Menil Collection Bookstore (Houston). He has participated in group shows in Germany, Italy, Spain, France, Australia, Iceland, Greece, and the UK. Reviews of his work have appeared in Art in America, Artforum, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Artnet and Glasstire, among others. He is the recipient of numerous awards and residencies including the Mildred Pelzer Grant, the Willhelm and Jane Bodine Fellowship, The Iowa Arts Fellowship, the Montello Foundation Fellowship, the Bay Space Artist in Residence, and several awards from the Austin Critics Table in Texas. McNamee-Tweed’s extensive publishing history includes dozens of artist books as well as larger, collaboratively produced editions monograph of his ceramic paintings. In addition to his studio practice, he has worked as a curator for over ten years, both independently and with institutions.

Artists in this Exhibition

• Kevin McNamee-Tweed

Artist Video