Kenny Watson

An MFA graduate from ECA, Kenny Watson has developed a distinctive practice which mixes fine art techniques with the materials and idioms of Street Art and advertising. In previous projects, he has deployed the traditional methods of wood block printmaking, signwriting and anamorphic trompe l’oeil to create startling images on temporary hoardings.

For Parley, Watson brings a familiar element of the streetscape indoors, cladding a rectangular room from floor to ceiling with bill posters used to advertise the Edinburgh Evening News. Watson spent over 12 months from 2006–08, painstakingly amassing individual posters from newspaper vendors around the city. The resulting work, refigured here especially for Parley, is a highly unsettling portrait of a city and its press, in which, through sheer dint of repetition, the headlines, each deeply emotive and individually sensational, collectively dissolve into a visual noise.

Watson’s new hoarding for the exterior of the exhibition space enacts a similar strategy. Laboriously achieved by hand, at first glance, the complex imagery of the exterior speaks the familiar language of advertising. Watson’s densely worked surface is built up from successive layers of text, whose provocative message, through repeated application, literally writes itself out of existence.