Karen Kilmnik
June 26-August 12, 2007
Powel House Museum
Philadelphia, PA
Curated by Robert Wuilfe
Landmarks is pleased to present an exhibition at the Powel House Museum by internationally-acclaimed artist Karen Kilimnik. The latest in the Landmarks Contemporary Projects series, this installation by Philadelphia native Kilimnik has been timed to coincide with the artist’s current retrospective at the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art (on view till August 5th, 2007).
The Powel House Museum---the Georgian home of Samuel Powel, the mayor of Philadelphia just before and after the American Revolution---has been a familiar site to Kilimnik while growing up in Philadelphia. As one of the centers of the political and social life of Colonial and Revolutionary Philadelphia, the Powel House is an ideal location for Kilimnik’s ongoing interrogation of history. In its reconstructed and reinterpreted tourist-attraction state, the house is also a fertile ground for Kilimnik to continue exploring the magic potential of an artwork’s environment.
Kilimnik’s project at the Powel House is her first major intervention in a historic space in the United States, and it is fitting that it should take place in her home-city. The project consists of subtle additions of sound works, paintings and sculptural elements that draw from sources as varied as 18th-century painting, stories by Charles Dickens, The Scarlet Pimpernel and The Avengers television series. For viewers, we hope Kilimnik’s intervention is at once familiar and discordant: recognizable cues from popular culture attempt to reveal the impossibility of objective historical interpretation. Historic sites, such as those that populate Philadelphia, are by their nature a mixed bag of solid research and scholarship, wishful thinking and collective fantasy. Kilimnik’s poetic and subjective explorations -- such as placing picturesque tufts of artificial snow on interior windows of the Powel House, or showing photographs of Philadelphia streets that give a Dickensian era feeling - provide a new way to connect the contemporary mind to the past.
Click on images below to advance slideshow.
[Slideshow image notes: Images 9 and 10 are views of concurrent exhibition Karen Kilimnik at the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art, curated by Ingrid Schaffner. Other installation views courtesy 303 Gallery, NYC.]
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