#17 Ken D Resseger

STUDIO PROGRAM 2024

We are thrilled to introduce Ken D Resseger, our current studio program artist at 99 Canal, currently using STUDIO 4 to complete a new body of oil paintings he will be showing in early 2025.

Painting for me is about using the medium to explore and then flesh out ideas that wouldn’t arise through other musings. Journaling as similar example of a medium that might help goad or structure ideas you wouldn’t be thinking in the everyday, but obviously limited by letters and words.

I am searching, looking for the ‘ah-ha’ moment in a process rather than working from ideas outwards.

As an artist I’m invested in this process in order to both explore and deliver novel concepts, while extending this same attitude quite heavily into the nuts and bolts of painterly representation.

I employ a variety of techniques often peripheral to painting, exploiting the wood supports I paint on by using knife tools and even power sanders. This is always done subtlety not to overtake the focus of the art but often results in unexpected artifacts, a strange richness that wouldn’t exist in pure gessoed canvas.

There is a lot of immediacy to how I work in general but I often exacerbate this by removing my ‘errors’ with these tools rather than painting over. This gives the rather mulled over work a type of clarity for me, a trick of visual harmony.

As written in the recent press release of my solo show at CANADA:

“Erasure plays an important role in Resseger’s process, and the paintings often feature seemingly incomplete passages. Upon closer inspection, the blank spots reveal themselves to carry the residue of removal and redaction.”

“Through bold gestures or what feels like single-hair brush strokes, the works replicate the familiar while conjuring a view of the natural world that teems with magical conjunctions.”

Despite the strange formal play and intuitive approach, finding new methods of representation is clearly the focus of my work. Subjects range from ephemeral moments of the sublime to what I currently call ‘pulp’ or more media-referent works, which seem to illustrate odd areas of the psyche rather than purely objective reality

About the Artist

Ken D. Resseger (b.1981, Providence, R.I.) lives and works in NYC. He holds a B.F.A. from Pratt Institute in NYC. Recent exhibitions include his solo exhibition Objet Outta, at Canada, NY, Naturalisms, Galerie Sardine, Paris, Arcadia and Elsewhere, James Cohan, New York, NY; The Thick Stream, Canada, New York, Orwell’s Garden (show), Orwells’s Garden, Brooklyn, NY, The Deep End, Canada, East Hampton, NY.

Studio Program | 99 CANAL

The Studio Program is a one to four-month program open to emerging and mid-career artists based both within and outside New York City.

Individuals are invited to work at 99 Canal based on their necessity for studio space and their potential impact on the neighborhood and our community. A key feature of the studio program is its strong focus on peer-to-peer engagement, recognizing the transformative power of collaboration and knowledge exchange.