KEN NURENBERG

Born in 1985 in South Bend, Indiana, Ken Nurenberg is a multi-disciplinary artist and musician currently working in the margins between painting, drawing, photography, and digital 3D technology. He also performs guitar-based electronic music under the alias Kenneth Martin, and played lead guitar and synths for the Columbus band Mike Teevee and the Porch Mutts. He holds an MFA from The Ohio State University and a BFA from the Herron School of Art and Design. He has completed residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, The Vermont Studio Center, and L'ecole D'art Contemporain de Pont-Aven in Pont-Aven, France. He has recently shown in Sante Fe and Los Angeles as part of the Gallery Tally collective and in 2014 had a solo exhibition at the Canzani Galleries at the Columbus College of Art and Design titled "Waiting Room." 

Recently he began collaborating with Melissa Vogley-Woods on a Youtube channel called Cart Pushers, producing video interviews with Columbus area artists and curators.

ARTWORK

ARTIST STATEMENT

Over the last few years the subject of my work has transitioned from applying photography theory to images of war to a practice that uses the lessons of that previous study to delve into personal subject matter, specifically issues of living with mental illness. As a graduate student I was obsessed with disorientation and false forms of empathy and understanding created by looking at images of violence. I described the relationship between subjects of these images and the viewer as being like a double helix, two geographies that spiral around one another along the same trajectory without coming into contact. I found that it was impossible to make meaningful work from that imagery directly, but I found a form of tension and anxiety in the nature of representational images that closely correlated to the isolation and dislocated sense of self created by bipolar disorder. As a result, I try to overload my work with different forms of pictures, and work recursively by using previous work as subjects for paintings, photographs, or CGI renderings. If I make sculptures they are always presented as photographs, divorced from a form that can be touched.