Kevin Sloan | Devotion and Disorder
June 7th, 2025 - July 5th, 2025
Join K Contemporary and Kevin Sloan on Saturday, June 7th, 2025 from 3 - 6 PM for an opening reception at K Contemporary, located at 1412 Wazee Street, Denver, CO
Note: Please check back in the coming weeks for additional images.
In a time of profound environmental change, Kevin Sloan’s images depict rare beauty intertwined with puzzlement. Part art, part artifice, his painstaking vignettes of animals posed in unusual and unlikely places read like old-fashioned studio portraits with contrived natural backgrounds attempting to project the sitters’ mood or status. The shutter speed is slow as fauna ranging from zebras to dolphins teeter in their liminal, confined spaces. Many stand on beaches or dangle in marshy estuaries at low tide, caught in the fragile moment before the Earth’s gravitational pull returns water to the beach. Are they safe or vulnerable? Are these works memorials or monuments? Do they mourn the loss of something rare and sacred, or do they enshrine and elevate it? Kevin’s characters navigate an eerie, challenging world yet exude an unexpected stillness and calm. Sloan embraces this duality.
Perhaps it’s not coincidental that for the past five years, the artist’s studio has been housed in a former Romanian Orthodox church, where, for over a century, the sanctuary walls were adorned with painted icons of saints and holy figures. These icons, typically featuring a singular, centrally located subject, were sacred and used in worship, meditation, and spiritual contemplation. While not emulating these icons directly, Sloan incorporates the symbolism and metaphor that lends them an otherworldly quality. As with the icons, the fantastical, familiar, sacred, and mundane coexist in a shared space.
K Contemporary owner and curator, Doug Kacena, comments, “In Kevin’s quasi-spiritual tableaux, his creatures become icons in their own right, verging on objects of devotion. The pictures evoke reverence and desire but have a sense of foreboding. This turns the familiar genres of still life painting and portraiture into something more enigmatic, enticing, and mysterious.”
The exhibition’s 16 paintings are joined by 3 sculptures, where found objects are overtaken by the natural world. Vines, barnacles, and shells reclaim a car tire that could have conceivably been disposed in an ocean basin. Moss, fungi, and flowers upholster a wheelchair entitled, Rehabilitation of the old grove. These unnatural accumulations of shells, coral, moss, and flowers also cling to the subjects in Sloan’s paintings. It’s up to the viewer to determine if they’re parasitic, ornamental, or harbingers of what’s to come. In some ways, the art is a stand-in for greater societal issues and stories, almost like fairy tales that traffic in the realm of good and evil.
Kevin intones, “I think of these paintings as intentionally unfinished sentences. That’s where the viewer comes in. Every person will concoct a different ending to my open-ended paintings. The work is a multivalent, visual prompt inviting the viewer to probe their own beliefs, experiences, and thoughts in a non-threatening way.”