UMVA Showcase – Winter 2026: Kenny Cole, Mark Barnette, John Ripton, Kelly Desrosiers

Kenny Cole

For me, using text in my art can be a way of establishing a non-aesthetic entry into aesthetics, a pedestrian doorway or foothold into an otherwise unfamiliar realm for an innocent viewer. Text can be viewed opaquely or transparently, the latter meaning that the words are “read” rather than admired for their shape and form. I strive to maintain this transparency and view it as a real-world device that is essentially a pre-packaged element to paint with. The only aspect of this full package that I reject is the typographical “good rag” right edge. Instead, text, for me, when employed as the singular element in a painting or drawing, is in service of the picture plane, and words and letters should run full width to the picture plane edge, even if it means that a word gets cut off improperly according to typography standards. In this respect, I maintain its relative transparency, but treat it compositionally, in terms of its use as a painting element. 

I am currently engaged in deconstructing some threads of political banter. My interest is piqued by things that have strange alliances, crossovers, and vestigial purposes, which, as an artist, I am compelled to explore and transform. Three of the pictured pieces here were generated from a piece of junk mail received from Erika Kirk, now the figurehead, after her husband Charlie’s assassination, representing Turning Point USA. It is an appeal for a financial donation to the enterprise, along with praises of capitalism, patriotism, and Christian faith (all of which are understood as intertwined and inseparable), and some threats . . . as a response to perceived threats. I’ve rendered her words, curated, as two of the pieces, and for the third piece, I’ve rendered an AI-solicited response to a question I asked of it, regarding her phrasing or grammar. Further deconstruction takes the form of finding words that are critical and disparaging, extracted from the text as worm-like loops, word-search fashion. Despite the demagogic nature of this work, my allegiance is to art-making first. My activist goals, though front and center, must pass through the gauntlet of aesthetic trickery, game rules, and intuitive rearrangement.

The fourth image pictured here depicts segments from a larger body of work. In this respect, there is some consideration made for the readability of text in that the whole body of text, which is sizeable, has been divided and formatted into sections. It is a transcription of a manifesto from the website of the Patriotic Front, a white nationalist group, written, I believe, to encourage a certain mindset to join their group. My aesthetic approach involves the process of slow painterly transcription and intuitive extraction of withering word search selections. The full piece will consist of 300 twelve-inch square canvases and ultimately appear as near unreadable gray static, from the distance that will be required to view the whole piece at once. My interest is in developing my own abilities to distinguish dangerous transitions, where points of language can cross over from ideologies of principle to ideologies of exclusion and hate as defined by organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center. The painterly process of transcription provides me with the measured experience of building and developing a critical response to flawed beliefs. The viewer, I hope, is, in turn, confronted with a certain enormity of thinking as a problematic challenge in confronting and establishing an articulate claim to one’s identity as American.

 

Mark Barnette

I started this project in October 2023, when Israel—with the unconditional support of the United States—began its latest effort to eradicate the population of Palestine. In the seven months that followed, I methodically made my way through the sixty-five acres of Evergreen Cemetery in Portland, Maine, until I was confident I had at least seen and acknowledged every child buried there whose stone was still present or legible.

Like every one of the Palestinian children murdered since 1948, every child buried at Evergreen had a name and was beloved of parents and siblings and extended family and neighbors who welcomed the arrival of new life with tenderness and joy, and who later mourned the premature death of someone they had instinctively loved and cared for. 

I didn’t make these pictures to effect change because no change will be coming. I didn’t make them to “raise awareness” or challenge Western orthodoxy or to “speak truth to power.” I made these pictures for me—and only me—because there was absolutely nothing else I could do. 

 

John Ripton

The four photographs represent contemporary realities. In each image, words convey heavy irony. The images themselves complement and deepen the irony, provoking complicated thoughts and feelings in the viewer. Together, the images and words compel the viewer to consider where he/she/they stand in relation to critical issues facing humankind. 

Red or green, at first glance, seems to be a vendor of cheese and vegetables parked down the street. A closer look reveals that the words are conveying something other than vitamins, protein and flavorful garden produce. One type of cheese, for example, is really a question: “How much of this stuff do we need?” What stuff? Material? Comestibles or consumables? Another cheese claims it “Keeps The Economy Growing.” Lettuce asserts that “Money creates insecurity, greed, fear, and inequality.” And beans represent a low carbon footprint and minimal methane production. Red and green wrapped in a Taoist yin-yang can represent many ideas. One message exhorts the viewer to “Hold It All Together.”

Entrance captures a man, possibly an immigrant, or not, surrounded by the bars of a gate and corridor to some ride. He works in a fair where merry-go-rounds and Ferris wheels transport joyous people through grinding and spinning space. He appears stoic. The word entrance has a welcoming aspect. The gate will swing open if you have “two coupons.”

Head scarf depicts a person in a hijab. Messages are scrawled on the image. One says something like “I make a cry and a tear . . . tasted like a kiss.” Another message warns of “the cultism of a caste system.” The scribe suggests the viewer “look at India.” Ironically, the image is pasted on the deteriorating wall of a poor section of West Soho in New York City at the turn of the present century. Not far away, abandoned buildings are occupied by people without homes. The viewer can’t help a flood of complicated feelings, living in a country where headscarves are often looked at askance.

In Recycling, cans are left on the sidewalk. One has a broad green sticker “Recycling Program.” To the right of the four cans is a plastic bag with refuse inside. Are some of the items in the bag recyclable, too? Is one of the barrels plastic? This is a street in the East Village (NYC) where empty lots and adjacent apartment buildings are common. A streetlight brightens the wall where the verdant energy of plants and trees envelops the battered cans. “Wise” is written on the wall.

 

Kelly Desrosiers

I used to do bodies of work in the media and style I thought best conveyed the ideas I wanted to express. This led to an array of work that some called schizophrenic, but to me made total sense. My reading habits are similarly broad and obsessively deep. One such body of work involved text and intaglio and lions, tigers, bears, rhinos, etc. I happened to be learning intaglio, which, along with etching, seemed like an utterly 19th-century medium. I was somehow at the time reading historical accounts of the big game hunters in Africa and Asia. It was simultaneously Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My!

I was delighted and horrified by the text. One moment I was reading a safari shopping list which included exotic marmalade, linens, bubblebath and gin, and the next moment racist comments about the dark-skinned human beings who were made to recreate upper-crust environments for the big game hunters in the wilderness. Not to mention the contrast between the dark-skinned scouts and trackers who actually had the expertise to find the big game and keep their employers safe, versus the braggadocio of the great white “hunters” who posed before their gruesome trophies. There were also accounts of the man-eating “tiger of Tsavo” and other vilifications of big game species. The series of intaglio prints involved silhouettes or simplifications of each big game animal, often flayed or skinned, along with a ghost print. The full color prints were deeply layered with overlapping patterns and some archaic symbols. On the pale ghost prints, I used an old-fashioned fountain pen loaded with walnut ink to write fragments of the texts in a florid cursive hand. The text, sometimes upside down, was fragmented and interwoven with parts of the image in an attempt to marry or entangle the image with its history.

 

 

Image at top: Kenny Cole, Garbled, acrylic on canvas, 120 x 360 in., 2025.