Artist Featured on Local Art Wall
Kenny Jensen
Diverging Paths
www.kennyjensen.com
kj@kennyjensen.com
@kennyjensenartist
Artist Biography:
I am a multidisciplinary, professional artist and amateur naturalist who has been focused on growing a self-sustainable oil painting practice for the past few years. My wide ranging creative practices flow out of a lifelong connection to the natural environment and insatiable curiosity fueled by divergent tendencies…
I have been active in the Tampa Bay Area arts community for over 20 years as an exhibiting artist, grass roots organizer, curator, art handler and museum preparator for many of the area museums, galleries, and schools – including the Morean Arts Center, The Studio @620, The Museum of Fine Arts, USF Contemporary Art Museum, University of Tampa, etc.
I have had several well received solo and two person exhibitions and have participated in dozens of group exhibitions both locally and out of state, including multiple curated, climate crisis focused exhibitions that featured regional and national artists. I have received multiple artist grants and have completed multiple public art and private commissions. I have also been invited to give dozens of local and virtual lectures, and have been the subject of multiple interviews and publications.
I currently live in St. Petersburg, FL with my wife Maggie (who is a farmer and lifelong nurturer of plants and animals), and young son Cedar with our old shepherd, bunny, and 6 hens. In a few years we are moving to our family land “The Floating Woods” in rural Gulf Hammock, FL, to grow a farm and artist residency focused on forest bathing and environmental stewardship.
Artist Statement:
As a Florida native who spent much of my childhood outdoors both in the city and the country, I have always had an essential connection to our unique natural environment. This relationship has steadily deepened over the years through my evolving art practice, and related ecological research. Becoming a parent has also raised the stakes and heightened my ecological awareness and concern. As a result there is a tension present in my work – An earnest desire to share the wonder and mystery
I continually encounter in common, overlooked nature while also expressing grief and frustration over what is actively being lost.
All of the work on display here is a part of an ongoing environmentally focused sculpture project entitled Paths of Consumption which recreates found patterns eaten out of by various insect larvae at exaggerated scale and with a full spectrum of layered hues. This series is a meditation on our consumption of the natural environment. The inverted insect paths act as a kind of metaphorical map to guide us to reflect on our own record of consumption as we develop and grow, both as individuals and as a society.
My current painting practice is informed and inhabited by 20 years of past and ongoing nature focused explorations in photography, video, sculpture, the collection and presentation of found-objects, and large scale installation. I am also deeply influenced by BOOKS (esp. speculative fiction (Jeff Vandermeer), ecological writings (Wendell Berry), theoretical physics (Carlo Rovelli) and contemplative philosophy (Richard Rohr)), CINEMA (esp. Andrei Tarkovsky) and certain
SURREALISTS (esp. Yves Tanguy & Max Ernst).
