Poor Taste. Taste likes to masquerade as instinct, as if refinement were innate and bad taste a personal failure. In practice, taste is a social technology. It sorts objects, interiors and people, rewarding familiarity with the codes of those who already hold cultural authority. Kenny works with net curtains, pebbledash, faux marble, saturated colour, gloss and ornament because these surfaces carry the stigma of class. She neither apologises for them nor redeems them through irony. Their seduction is deliberate. The work exposes how quickly pleasure becomes decoration, and decoration becomes disqualification, when its codes originate outside the sanctioned languages of high culture.
Rocky, 2014
Stained Reputation, 2022
The boring poor, 2014
Pebbledash, 2014It’s Curtains for you Elizabeth my dear, 2016
Golden shower, 2016