Kevin Veronneau keeps his paint supplies in a large, white dollhouse with walls that appear to be dripping blood. Hanging from the rafters in his converted mill space are a tattered black pram that looks like it’s from the 1920s, a 1950s-era plastic spring-loaded rocking horse and a black and chrome seat stripped from some long-ago amusement park ride. He says he used to habitually scavenge for relics and weird bits of Americana at junk shops and antique stores because, for a time, he thought surrounding himself with “crap” helped his creative process. Now, he says, not so much.
These days Kevin is trying to purge some of his painstakingly curated treasures, but you might not know it by looking around his Elmwood studio. A taxidermied deer head that he’s covered carefully in sparkly purple paint is mounted to the wall and a stuffed duck, a football helmet and a plastic replica of the Millennium Falcon are cast about, waiting to be given the same treatment. On a workbench in the center of the room are stencils, Exacto knives and scraps of silver Mylar that he’s shaping into balloons forming the letters E, G and O. “It’s my inflatable ego!” he says, eyes lighting up. “I’ve had this idea for years and I’m finally doing it.”
The balloon project is somewhat ironic, since Kevin is an artist whose ego seems relatively tame in an era of social media-aided, easy-access exhibitionism. As I write this, he doesn’t have a website, rarely posts on Facebook, has exactly two photos on his Instagram account and seems far more interested in the play and creative process of his artwork than he does with actually showing it to the public. His last gallery show was two years ago, a solo exhibition at World’s Fair Gallery in Pawtucket entitled Do Not Eat. It included installations like a pillowcase stuffed with 15 years’ worth of his hair, the phrase “I am a hunter” spelled out in caps on a white wall with Oscar Mayer wieners and the phrase “I am a gatherer” spelled out on an adjacent wall with 17 years’ worth of receipts he’d saved from groceries and takeout.
“As I get older I’ve learned not to take myself too seriously, and I’m noticing some overall themes in my work: a lot of wordplay, self-effacement and just poking fun,” says Kevin. “I think one of the nicest compliments I’ve ever received was after that last show. Someone came up to me and said ‘I didn’t know art could be like that.’ That just made my day, because really, I think art can be anything.”
When I visit his studio, Kevin greets me at the door wearing basketball shorts, a Smith&Weeden band t-shirt and a mass of curly hair that is slightly evocative of Sideshow Bob. He offers me a glass of Pinot Noir even though he doesn’t drink, then proceeds to tell me about the time he auctioned off a $100 bill for $55 during a performance art piece at Tazza. Then he shows me part of a series he’s been working on – a composition notebook filled cover to cover with the phrase “becoming sinister” written alternatingly with his right and left hands, which he says is an exercise in ambidexterity that doubles as a meditation on the false dichotomy of left = bad, right = good. Sinister, he explains, derives from a Latin word that originally means “left” but eventually took on the double meaning of evil or unlucky.
“The artist Bruce Nauman has this concept that if you claim to be an artist, then everything you do is art. He’s probably someone that I steal from the most. But that’s the beauty of it, because he was ripping off someone else,” says Kevin. “That’s kind of how I view the process of art making – just grasping the idea that there’s not much original stuff out there, but there are incredible takes on stuff. And if you break it all down, it’s kind of like we’re all just doing cave painting in a way.”
To view more of Kevin’s art, or to encourage him to share more of it with the world, follow him on Instagram at @bowtiek
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