Brian Kenny

Target Drawings

Brian Kenny’s Target Drawings is an ongoing series of large-scale drawings on vintage American police shooting targets.  Made with street-tested mediums like sharpies, paint markers, spray paint and tape, they are layered over various images of gun and knife-wielding paper “criminals.”  The targets act as background and catalyst for Kenny’s rabid layering of line, text and (dis)figuration.  The imagery explores and deconstructs the author’s own queer identity and experiences as well as his fascination with sports, military, sex and urban cultures.  Bling and guns; wrestlers and gymnasts; soldiers and thugs – all and more are depicted in frenetic, obsessive drawing.  Target Drawings often include text “cut-ups,” oscillating between autobiography and the absurd.  They are a bold social response, Kenny’s “firing back” at stereotypes of American pop culture and its fixations with youth, sex and violence.

Brian Kenny, “Target Drawings”