University at Buffalo (UB)
Published January 25, 2021
Cornelia Magazine, Issue 5
Is Out Now!
in print and online.
Matt Kenyon’s Empathy Machines
“But when it comes to humans, the specter of complicity is harder to evade, and the external threat is almost always a wolf of our own devising.”
The Wolf at the Door, artist and University at Buffalo professor Matt Kenyon’s extraordinary requiem for humanity, conscripts us the moment we walk into Buffalo’s storied Big Orbit Gallery. Masked due to COVID-19, our identities effectively obscured, we ourselves become unwitting objects in Kenyon’s indictment of hegemony. The trappings of social distancing amplify every work in the exhibition, driving home its poignant central theme: our most vulnerable have been consigned to the periphery, and those of us with the privilege to be visiting an art gallery during a pandemic are implicated.
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