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Kelly Inouye | The Company You KeepPost an Event »
This month, Interface Gallery presents The Company You Keep: An installation by Kelly Inouye. This will be Inouye's first large scale, installation-based project and brings an exciting new direction to her work. The artist reception is this Friday November 1st, from 6-9 pm.
The Company You Keep references Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, the archetypal nature show in which Marlin Perkins sent Jim Fowler to study animal behavior in particularly dramatic made-for-TV ways. A riveting nature show in its time, Wild Kingdom might also be seen as a strange mechanism for advertising insurance.
Equal parts anthropological study and comedic send-up, Inouye’s installation examines the show as a time capsule reflecting the mentality of the era in which it was created. Themes explored include: the application of science to investigate mysteries of the natural world, the use of language to elevate the importance of a project, and above all, Man’s classic literary struggle with Nature. Inouye's work highlights the incongruity of the show's slogans considering the current state of our healthcare system and reveals almost sinister undertones of the show's patriarchal tropes.
These undertones are very present in a limited edition print that Inouye has created for Interface Gallery, entitled, "Protecting you in ways no one ever thought of before." Based on one of Inouye's drawings, and rawn from an actual TV still, the image shows Jim Fowler being buried by an assistant and adorned with a camouflage headdress in order to attempt to catch a falcon to "study it." The image out of context and juxtaposed with the text takes on a quite different range of possible interpretations.
Inouye's work has been exhibited nationally at venues including Morgan Lehman Gallery and The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council in New York and Southern Exposure and the Berkeley Art Center in the Bay Area. Her paintings have also been featured in Watercolor Magazine and New American Paintings. She is a graduate of UC San Diego in La Jolla (BA 1998) and The San Francisco Art Institute (MFA 2008).