Rabid Methods

“Barbara Kendrick has been honing her craft for many years and the recent work revels in this material pleasure along with more of the uncanny narratives for which she is known. There are two directions: small collages and expressionistic painting in watercolor and ink……... Kendrick’s recent collage work is only the latest in a long career of using found materials as a means of bridging the familiar with the unfamiliar, reality with fantasy, and allowing art to remind us of the tenuous grip on reason as a primary epistemological model. Collage’s process of cutting and re-pasting from recognizable printed matter speaks to the ultimate contingency of all that we know.”

“Kendrick appropriates her collage materials from a broad array of sources—art history books, fashion magazines, medical texts, engravings, personal photographs, esoteric encyclopedias, and myriad other material……With promiscuous inclusivity, Kendrick democratizes visual matter so that all things have the potential to become something else.”

“The watercolor paintings evoke the same idea of metamorphosis, only their body references are more visceral and strange. In Whizzle, for example, despite its sweet palette of pinks and reds and yellows, pulpy forms with hairy extensions and oozing slits and punctures create a frolicking scene of ornamental decay……. Kendrick’s fleshy suggestions speak to that which is both alluring and menacing—it is a sensibility of the decadent.”

“Making these paintings is an extended process for Kendrick as the pieces evolve over time. She lays down a mark or form, leaves it, then comes back days later, sometimes weeks later, and adds something else. In this, they are like the collages, which assemble disparate parts into a whole, albeit one idiosyncratic and bizarre. And this is exactly where Kendrick wants us to be, poised at the edge of belief through a fascination with that which is recognizable but also extraordinary.”

Lisa Wainwright, Interim Dean, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Excerpts from the catalog for Atlas of Encounters, February, 2009, I-space, Chicago, IL