A Dove With Books On Its Head

A Dove With Books on Its Head

March 28 – April 23, 2025

Kian McKeown

Opening Reception: Friday, March 28, 6-8pm

NARS Project Space

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NARS Foundation is pleased to present A Dove With Books on Its Head, a solo exhibition by Kian McKeown. A Dove With Books on Its Head presents a selection of recent drawings and kinetic sculptures. These works are made in response to the artist's daily waking fantasies and desires for something more. Presenting scenarios that at first seem confounding and painful, Kian's work poses deviancy as a path to freedom and satisfaction. Not freedom in a general sense but perhaps an imagined freedom from one’s own body or bogged-down state of reality. The two sculptures utilize clunky wooden mechanisms and incorporate cast silicone and shaped epoxy forms, while the four drawings are made of thickly layered wax crayon and colored pencil.

The sculptures in A Dove With Books on Its Head draw on several influences, notably Nikki de Saint Phalle’s kinetic installations and Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet. In addition to their dynamic compositions, the sculptures operate in repetitive motion, mimicking the mechanisms of desire, anxiety, and sensuality. The forms reference sex toys, childrens’ toys, and common tools, questioning the formal qualities of these kinds of objects; what distinguishes something as an object of utility versus an object of pleasure or violence.

In pointing to desire, the works in this exhibition imply lack—a perfect object that can never be attained. The drawings are proposals for scenarios, gadgets, and characters that Kian wants you to consider. The sculptures are further attempts to connect to you by reaching out in physical space.

The drawings start as fleeting ideas, blurry images, materialized into two words or short sentences on Kian's notes app: 

Knives falling out of boots

Spring in pants

Head spike sun

Hands over eyes

Rock oracle

Gear in hand

A bridge going through your legs

Bird hands

Back satellite

A dove with books on its head

Spike face

Bent arm bone balancing

Tree person crack

Skull braid

Spring back

Belly crown of stones

A carrot cradled by its shadow

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About the artist:

Kian McKeown (b. 1999 New York, NY) is an artist working in drawing, sculpture, collage, and installation to create diverse artworks, stylistically varied yet cumulatively engaging. Kian is a 2021 BFA recipient of The Cooper Union, a 2024 Participant of Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, a current Artist Fellow at the National ArtsClub in Manhattan and a current MFA candidate at Hunter College.

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NARS Foundation Galleries are open to the public from 12pm - 5pm, Monday - Friday. Please contact info@narsfoundation.org with any other inquires.