About

Kian McKeown’s drawings are exercises in improvisation: they are hasty, surreal sketches prompted by the incomplete, “unformed” thoughts he can only articulate in abstract one-liners like “arm and hammer” or “head and handle.” Registering somewhere between the witticisms of Lee Lozano’s tools and Gary Larson’s “Cow Tools,” the resulting subjects are vague, dreamlike mashups. They are unrecognizable objects, removed from reality in order to invoke the metonymic chains of recall and association. Here they seem to represent two serpentine trash pickers (or frayed cables), a broken bone, a spring …