Kahlil Robert Irving

Drawing from the vast scroll of digital culture—which the artist describes as “an everlasting feedback loop of my experience”—Irving mines the Internet as a living archive of Black life death remembrance celebration and survival.
Irving creates dense assemblages of images and replicas of everyday objects. This exhibition brings together imagery ranging from a Facebook post commemorating the late Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor and a screenshot of an article on Betty M. Wheeler the founder and longtime principal of Metro High School a storied “school without walls” in St. Louis; to memes featuring the hip-hop duo OutKast and Kanye West and Kim Kardashian; to visual reflections on American protest and the ongoing dialogue about Confederate monuments. From this cache of images Irving creates decals and applies them to architectural surfaces in a layered compositional process. These decals also appear on his ceramics which Irving creates using a labor-intensive technique. Firing individual pieces multiple times in the kiln to achieve his intricate layering of image glaze and color he has forged a style that challenges distinctions between the work of the hobbyist the artisan and the artist.