kerrycdowney(at)gmail.com

My interdisciplinary practice explores embodied forms of resistance and transformation. My process is improvisational, rooted in a background in performance and time-based practices. Color acts as the generative engine that propels the gesture and stimulates an appetite for play. My palette is born of South Florida (80’s and 90’s) and my early experience working in nursing homes, two simultaneously saturated and bleached landscapes. Guided by genderqueer haptics, I use many forms of touch and pressure – rubbings, erasures, cuts, abrasions, markings – that accumulate as trace memories. My paintings and prints are layered with marks of their labor; I often rework old pieces from my archive (which dates back to 1993) and use materials accrued over decades. Like skin, the works are pocked and porous; they act as thresholds between the psychological and the embodied.

Through the act of making, metaphors emerge at the intersection of materiality and identity. I use a recurring lexicon of images like handles (to hold/to support/to reach), nets (thresholds/entanglement), and worms/holes (composting/excavating/quantum leaps), which speak to intimacy and interdependency. These surfaces are a means for constructing and deconstructing the ideology of self, reconstituting waste in ways that connect our interior worlds and sociopolitical landscapes. 

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Downey has recently had solo shows at Soloway Gallery and Underdonk in Brooklyn, NY, and Bureau of General Services / Queer Division and New Media Artspace at Baruch College in New York, NY. Downey's work has also been exhibited at the Bard CCS / Hessel Museum (Annandale, NY); Queens Museum (Flushing, NY); Leslie Lohman Museum of Art (New York, NY), Danspace Project (New York, NY); Knockdown Center (Maspeth, NY); Kate Werble (New York, NY); University of Arizona Museum of Art (Tucson, AZ), and Cooper Cole (Toronto, CA). Downey’s first major publication, We collect together in a net, was published by Wendy’s Subway in 2019. Downey is a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Emerging Artist Grant and Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant. Artist-in-residencies include Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Madison, ME; Triangle Arts Association, Brooklyn, NY; SHIFT at EFA Project Space, New York, NY; the Drawing Center’s Open Sessions, New York, NY; and the Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT. Downey participated in the Queer|Art|Mentorship program in 2013 (paired with Angela Dufresne). Their work has been in Artforum and The Washington Post and their writing has been published in The Brooklyn Rail, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, Art Journal Open, and the Journal of Museum Education. Downey holds a BA from Bard College and an MFA from Hunter College. Downey spent over a decade running community and access-based arts programs at The Museum of Modern Art; they have recently taught at Williams College, City College, and at Hunter College. Downey is currently visiting faculty in the Painting Department at the Rhode Island School of Design.