Spattered Columns is pleased to present Kerry Downey and Jeremy Willis’s new show, “You Can Have it All.” This collaborative installation of painting, video, collage, and sculpture addresses irreconcilable psychological relationships through visceral engagement of the viewer. “The work situates human need within our current cultural climate,” said Spattered Columns Director, Jamie Johnson, “contrasting personal realities with idealized desires. These two artists beg the question Why do I want what I want?”

Downey’s multi-media installation is an agitated series of household items that she has altered and re-organized based, on an absurdist sensibility and intuitive logic. Her play of textures, deteriorating color, and personal iconography transform ready-mades into dirty longings that question the hetero-imperatives we overlook daily. In her new video, Downey and Willis costume themselves in domestic bliss and perform strange new rituals of intimate collaboration.

Willis’s new body of paintings also addresses intimacy and desire; his gestural abstractions contain anxious figures in vivid quandaries. Figures vie for the attention of the viewer with impossible gestures that are thwarted by the elusive rendering of the paint and by the static nature of two-dimensional imagery. The figures cajole and writhe toward the viewer, expressing a lust for things that they cannot have.