Kenneth Shorr: Action Through Redaction

Action through Redaction is a retrospective exhibition in the sense that it presents the work of Kenneth Shorr dating from the mid-1970s to the present, but it is far from a chronological examination. Instead, it examines imagery, themes, and techniques that recur throughout Shorr’s career: the culmination of ideas he has explored for decades. The exhibition is a view into the artist’s min, in his own words, “An obsessive, pathological dialog with myself.” Shorr employs a biting wit to examine diverse subject matter. Nothing is immune to the scrutiny of his arched brow: the influences and abuses of the mass media; familiar cultural images not excluding arcane yet disconcerting racist cartoons; clichés of government bureaucratic culture; the dark psyche of corporate idealism; or what he refers to as “the idiotic tautology of the politician’s stump speech.”