Good Times | Kelly Inouye
Thursday March 17th - Sunday April 17th

Good Times is the second solo exhibition by Kelly Inouye at Interface. The show consists of both abstract and figurative watercolor works on paper which explore the construction of painting and narrative through the lens of syndicated network television from the 1970's and 80's.

The figurative work, rendered loosely in the style of Inouye's previous Sitcom Series, references selected images from the television shows Dynasty, Good Times, Fantasy Island, Flipper, Gentle Ben, and Lassie. The images in the show reflect memories of programs the artist watched as a pre-adolescent child, highlighting certain aspects of those stories that resonate today. Dissolving into negative space, these manufactured scenes of everyday life hint at a larger narrative context and amplify the sense of odd sentimentality associated with pop culture of a bygone era that was not so long ago.

Similarly, the abstract palette works play with the notion of de/constructed ir/reality. Pigments are complex, some sink and some float, water evaporates at different rates according to the weather, and these pools of color flow according to the changing topography of the paper. Evaporation leaves behind ghosts of pigment. As a series, these works interrogate notions of representation, extracting a repertoire of marks that both suggest and deny portrayal. These traces implicate the degeneration of memory: fragmentation that hints at but does not fulfill the promise of complete narrative. Like the figurative works, they are full of promise—on the cusp of resolving, coalescing into a comprehensible representation—yet they maintain their autonomy, complicating the viewer’s expectation of fulfillment.