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“[The] invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts [AND] which binds together—the dead to the living [AND] the living to the unborn.”
Joseph Conrad, ‘Preface’, The Nigger of Narcissus
“To the as-yet-unborn, to all innocent wisps of undifferentiated nothingness: Watch out for life.”
Kurt Vonnegut, Deadeye Dick
…and so, we, the living, who are witnesses to the twentieth century, who know, now, that everything is only connected by ‘and’ and ‘and’—and whose thoughts turn from time to time to the future—say, softly, to the unborn “watch out for life—you ain’t seen nothin’ yet” and…
Peter Kennedy
Ethereal, lyrical, and quietly provoking, Peter Kennedy’s new neon installation And So … Illumination I (2002-03) is an elegant engagement with the experience of history and the passing of time. Commissioned for the offices of Melbourne’s John Wardle Architects, this thirty-six metre long neon text spans the length of Russell Street’s Total House building, and illuminates the surrounding city with its densely-coded, fragmented and poetic message.
Kennedy’s long-standing interest in neon centres on its semiotic malleability. Although neon is loaded with connotation, as a legacy of its historical association with pop art, minimalism and consumer capitalism, it maintains an element of pliability which the artist can manipulate to redefine the medium’s (con)textual boundaries. Kennedy began to investigate the creative possibilities of illumination while working as a designer for Claude Neon during the late 1960s. His 1970 exhibition at Sydney’s Gallery A, Neon Light Installations, examined the formal and spatial implications of neon in abstract light environments. More recently, Kennedy returned to neon in his exhibition at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in 1998, Requiem... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline