Oscillating between fascination and apprehension, Kathleen Henderson illuminates our struggle to make sense of a senseless world with her expansive and ambitious exhibition of new drawings and sculptures at Rosamund Felsen Gallery.
At once agitated and masterful, Henderson’s oil-stick line confronts head-on the financial sector and its place in a system of gross inequalities; the excess and waste of massively expensive and tragically useless trophy projects, or ‘white elephants’; and a profiteering pharmaceutical industry that is moving beyond marketing drugs to humans and setting their sights on neurotic and depressed domestic animals as well. These new drawings, replete with tension and vulnerability, weave figurative narratives that are at once anonymous and achingly familiar.
Inspired by Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us - a collection of essays imagining the beauty and brutality of an Earth without humans, Henderson goes further with a group of drawings depicting voracious scenery overwhelming isolated ghost figures awed and dwarfed in an apocalyptic environment.
Deeply reflective, heartbreakingly honest and fiercely critical, Henderson’s poignant works are attempts to reveal the attitudes of people, society, and the world at large - along with the humorous, lovely, and at times disturbing interactions that result.