“Blainey creates graphic, imaginary shapes and designs with an other-worldly eye. She uses bright, often shocking colors to convey a ‘saturated’ quality to the images, as if they are wearing a costume. Often, her drawings are created with a vision of becoming a life-sized sculpture.”
—Abby Amols
BIO
A New Orleans native and daughter of the famous float builder Blaine Kern, Blainey Kern grew up immersed in Mardi Gras culture and her family’s business. As a child, she played among the floats alongside painters, sculptors and builders, learned how to build papier-mâché props, worked with fiberglass, and created flowers with an aunt.
Blainey received an undergraduate degree in art from Loyola University New Orleans and earned a Masters degree in Sculpture from Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). While at RISD, she produced a short film called "Maintenance Control" as her thesis and was awarded a summer scholarship to the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture residency program.
After graduating, she moved to New York City, where she worked as a costume and prop maker, and entered “Maintenance Control” in the New York Exposition of Short Film and Video where it won best short. The film was also exhibited at Mobius Video Space in Boston, MA at a show titled “New Ground: Video Landscapes” and at the deCordova Museum in Lincoln, MA at a show titled “Ritual Acts: Videos by Women”. Awarded a full scholarship to the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA, she went on to create another short film titled “Nourish”.
Having lived in New Orleans since 2008, Blainey has raised two daughters, taught art classes at Trinity Episcopal School, and exhibited her work at the Jonathan Ferrara Gallery, Nadine Blake and the New Orleans Academy of Fine Arts. Currently working as a full-time artist, Blainey's focus includes sculpture, jewelry, painting, and drawing.
ARTIST STATEMENT
In my work, I find inspiration from things found in daily life: plants, gardens, lawns, animals, toys, but also films by Fellini, Hitchcock, David Lynch, Tim Burton, and works by Margaret Atwood. Like them, I am most interested in constructing worlds that are fantastical, absurd, or even frightening. Things that bring joy and pleasure also hide a dark world of suppression and confinement. I want my work to make the viewer think about the ideas of freedom, nature and pleasure juxtaposed with ideas of control, the artificial and synthetic, conjuring a world of dominance and suppression. These are the themes that flow through my work, intentionally uncomfortable, where what we often encounter as normal is actually normalized through manipulation, reminding us to seek an underlying message that what is natural is not perfect and must be changed.
Yi-Fu Taun, geography scholar and known as the founder of the concept of human geography, proposed a theory that we each have an intimate affective bond with our surrounding environment informed by our own mental, emotional and cognitive states. We bring our own thoughts and ideas to each and every personal encounter, which creates its own tone and meaning. When referring to the concept of a secret garden, Taun notes, “far from being an escape into the grand simplicities of nature, it is in some ways as old as civilization's most contrived toy.” Taun explains that the elements of nature have become sources of delight for powerful people and reminders of their ability to command and impose. I believe we take comfort in manicuring our environment and creating spaces that feel like everything is within our control – unlike in nature, where everything is truly out of control. Likewise, we choose to identify our sense of self with our culture’s relentless messaging -- images that are consciously constructed and carefully manipulated. Such imagined perfection is impossible to attain. The messaging hides the malicious idea that we need to be dominated or subjugated under some ever-present force.
I like to investigate the stereotypes of domesticity we have created, where women’s roles continue to be defined by marketing strategies, even today. I want viewers to become aware of these manipulative ideas all around us. Transformation is underway. Ideas of fantasy taken to the extreme lead the way to emancipation, where the controlled ideal is freed from cultural misogyny. This transformation is very much like carnival, where masquerading is transformation, allowing us to push to the extreme, letting go and releasing.
My paintings and drawings focus on singular, voluptuous forms that are contained within saturated fields of color. Each image has its own energy, as if they could move, dance, swirl, or crawl. I see them “on display” in the same way that women have historically been “on display“– viewed as arm candy or trinkets that exist simply to adorn. Pieces vibrate with an internal tension, highlighting a sense of agitation, shaking in anticipation of some ultimate explosion. They are transforming, releasing themselves from a world of subjugation. Some appear egg-like, sprouting ideas of rejuvenation and growth. Some are shaped like aprons, suggesting the world of women’s work but also a maternal world of confinement and struggle. The colors I choose, while seemingly cheerful, lean toward the synthetic, evoking notions of the toxic and perverse.
Similarly, my sculptures called She-Bombs are unambiguously weapons on their way to war. Multiple sculptures, each moving on turntables, highlight that they are “on display.” They are a regiment of agents, where many are stronger than one -- a union of seemingly harmless pink objects, concealing their potential intention. Likewise, they resemble colonies, self-reproductive and regenerative – always incubating, growing, and changing.