How to File the Titles of Kevin McNamee-Tweed
Benjamin Terrell | September 6, 2020
In art school I worked in the library and it was my job to put things away. I spent whole days cataloging art books big/small, old/new, all different styles and genres from antiquity to avant-garde. There was a room we all wanted to eventually work in where you could see and, in white gloves, could touch and turn the pages (for library patrons) of the actual sketchbooks of world-famous artists like Van Gogh or Cezanne.
We see so much imagery now on iPhones and computer screens without giving thought to how we catalog it or if and where in the brain we “digest” the information into fact or fiction. For me, the art of Kevin Mcnamee-Tweed is the perfect crossroads to stop and think about “thinking”, to wash and hang dry memories big or small, or to take random fact, weigh and fillet it like the fish that could feed or be thrown back from the boat.
Turning the pages of KMT
1. I grew up thinking it was possible to talk to a friend if you each held an empty can attached by string. I remember thinking computers needed to be giant, even room size, like I saw them in the Hall Of Justice on the cartoon, “Super Friends.” I also remember being told people died purposely sitting in their own bathtubs with plugged in radios. These days I stop short of believing everything I hear, comfortable in the middle ground between “maybe so” and “perhaps.”
2. As a child (in the seventies), I often went with my father to the newspaper office where he worked. Every desk had a large ashtray and a giant typewriter. The latter looked to me like a sleek sewing machine for ideas. Years later, when my father called me to tell me he was dying, he borrowed a phrase from early Bugs Bunny to broach the subject. “It’s curtains for me Rocky,” he said.
