RETURN TO SENDER
AMANDA J. KENDRICK
9/20/24-10/19/24
Amanda J. Kendrick - Try to Keep From Callin’, 36” x 48”, oil on canvas, 2024
The Weather Station is pleased to present Return to Sender, an exhibition of new and recent work by Amanda J. Kendrick. Return to Sender brings together new and recent paintings together with a new sculpture. In this work, Kendrick overlays images lifted from family photographs alongside children's film imagery as a meditation on absence. This exhibition marks a kind of homecoming for Kendrick-- she was one of the founding members of The Weather Station, having lived and worked in the greater Lafayette area from 2018 to 2023.
The paintings in Kendrick's exhibition are each made using a similar process: the artist relies on family photographs and memories of childhood for imagery, while also including references to a variety of popular films. In Try to Keep from Callin', the space of the painting is split between two suntanned figures squinting towards an unseen camera as well as scenes from the 1999 film The Matrix and Flubber, from 1997. Although the smiling figures are not known to us, we slowly recognize them as siblings, in much the same way we slowly recognize the film imagery. Family photographs - even those of other families - often share a kind of visual language. In her paintings, Kendrick overlays this language with film fragments, creating a kind of hybrid aesthetics of nostalgia.
Amanda J. Kendrick - Emerald City, oil on canvas, 48” x 75”, 2024
Victor Fleming's 1939 masterpiece The Wizard of Oz holds a special significance for Kendrick, with the strangeness of its imagery, its enduring themes of home, and the intense production of both sets and costumes looming large in the artist's mind. In the large diptych Emerald City, the vibrant greens of the land of Oz are balanced by trees emerging from an overturned laundry basket, while a small figure reaches for apples growing against a paisley sky. In the left canvas, an unfinished wooden structure floats through the composition, a fragment of a figure just visible against the woodgrain. This structure has been lifted from a photograph of a backyard treehouse under construction, with Kendrick's older brother Brandon leaning against it proudly. Elsewhere in the piece, a small girl reaches out for an apple, while a curiously disembodied Willy Wonka gestures across the paintings' divide. In Kendrick's collaged spaces, childhood (perhaps innocence?) seems to be just beyond reach, at the end of the yellow brick road.
Amanda J. Kendrick - Six Months Old, oil and VHS tape on panel, 9” x 12”, 2024
Movies were important to Kendrick while growing up, becoming a shared currency between the artist and a brother 14 years her senior. "I have super-vivid memories of The Matrix, the first R-rated movie I ever saw, and which my brother showed me when I was 5," Kendrick recalls. "To this day, I still have all of these visceral reactions to it." These visceral reactions likely come from the repeated viewings of certain movies with her family members, lead to a blending between the artist's own life experiences and the plots, dialogue and imagery of the films she obsessively watched. Compounding this is the fact that Kendrick's brother Brandon was an amateur filmmaker in his youth who created his own films with the family camcorder, often featuring his younger sister. In much the same way Amanda appeared in her brother's films, Brandon appears throughout Return to Sender, sometimes as the smiling sibling, sometimes as a kind of father-figure to the young artist. In several works, Kendrick collages VHS tape directly on top of her imagery to create a shiny black background, and fuse a family image with the film on which it might have been recorded. Here, different types of memory become merged: much like the photograph, family films record shared good times, and can act as a record to look back on when our relationships inevitably shift or circumstances change.
Amanda J. Kendrick - Paisley, oil on wood panel, 16” x 20”, 2024
In 1989, mental health counselor Dr. Kenneth Doka first used the term disenfranchised grief to describe a quality of mourning "that persons experience when they incur a loss that is not or cannot be openly acknowledged, socially sanctioned, or publicly mourned.” It's a useful concept to frame the loss of a relationship, or an estrangement from a family member. According to recent survey conducted by Cornell University, a shocking 27% of American adults are estranged from a close family member, although the social stigma surrounding this phenomenon suggests the actual number may be higher.
Kendrick's brother Brandon went on to pursue a degree in video production, while she pursed degrees in painting and the visual arts. Not long ago, he cut off communications with his family, via a mailed letter to his mother and a blocking on social media of the artist. The exhibition title Return to Sender makes direct reference to these events, and the ways in which communication (or miscommunication) through long-distance messages can alter relationships -- sometimes irrevocably -- in the short- or the long-term. In the context of these circumstances, Kendrick's paintings become a new kind of "family portrait," one in which the vacancies of one's sibling are filled by the screen-based experiences that they've shared. In the end, Return to Sender examines the ways we might continue to dialogue with those whose physical presence is absent from our lives, as well as the complex ways we edit our own memories into a montage.
Kendrick's brother Brandon went on to pursue a degree in video production, while she pursed degrees in painting and the visual arts. Not long ago, he cut off communications with his family, via a mailed letter to his mother and a blocking on social media of the artist. The exhibition title Return to Sender makes direct reference to these events, and the ways in which communication (or miscommunication) through long-distance messages can alter relationships -- sometimes irrevocably -- in the short- or the long-term. In the context of these circumstances, Kendrick's paintings become a new kind of "family portrait," one in which the vacancies of one's sibling are filled by the screen-based experiences that they've shared. In the end, Return to Sender examines the ways we might continue to dialogue with those whose physical presence is absent from our lives, as well as the complex ways we edit our own memories into a montage.
Amanda J. Kendrick - Return to Sender III (detail), hardware cloth, papier-mache, VHS tape, dimensions variable, 2023
Amanda J. Kendrick -oil on VHS tape, dimensions variable, 2024
Top: Amanda J. Kendrick - Poppies, oil on VHS tape, 2024
Bottom: Amanda J. Kendrick - Amie, oil on VHS tape, 2024
Amanda J. Kendrick -oil on VHS tape, dimensions variable, 2024
Top: Amanda J. Kendrick - Poppies, oil on VHS tape, 2024
Bottom: Amanda J. Kendrick - Amie, oil on VHS tape, 2024
Amanda J. Kendrick - Flubber, oil on VHS tape, 2024
Amanda J. Kendrick was born in 1995 in Lansing, Michigan. A three sport-athlete, she carried over her competitive spirit and hardworking drive into her studio practice. She graduated from Albion College with a BFA in Studio Art, and went on to get her MFA at Purdue University with a focus on Painting and Sculpture. She has exhibited her work nationally and has had numerous solo and group exhibitions in both traditional and experimental spaces. She has received numerous awards for her work including a Penland Partner Scholarship through Purdue University in 2020, the Purdue Distinguished Creative Master's Award for her thesis exhibition in 2021, and was the Suzanne Wilson Artist-in-Residence in Glen Arbor, MI in 2022. In addition to maintaining a dynamic studio practice experimenting with a range of materials, she also makes her own clothing. She works and lives in Asheville, NC with her husband and their 5lb dog.