For his fourth solo exhibition at The Project, Kori Newkirk continues his investigation of self-portraiture and the mediated image of the body in contemporary culture with a series of drawings and a large-scale sculpture.

Referencing some of his early works—such as Channel 9 and Channel 11 in which identity has been obscured beyond recognition—Newkirk here borrows from the medium of stained glass. Rendered in Plexiglas and steel, the artist’s visage is fashioned in interlocking blue-colored panels, producing a skeletal geography.

Newkirk explores the physical qualities and metaphorical associations of stained glass, as the spiritual exaltation and transcendence traditionally associated with the medium transpire in this new work. Standing over six-feet tall, the portrait’s monumentality also points to notions of the sublime. Yet, as a screen detached from any presumed context, the portrait becomes a modern ruin that allows competing narratives to be projected upon it. Its missing panels may suggest the erosion of times past or the abrupt end to the creation of a new icon. Exposing the psychological disconnect between the subject and its oversized representation, Newkirk acknowledges the pitfalls of hubris, where ego and ambition collide to produce moments of both triumph and defeat.

Newkirk’s works on paper provide additional perspectives to the narrative as they convert the steel armature of the stained glass into mappings of his face and body. The rendering is fragile as the lines are bleached out of the colored paper in a gesture of erasure.

Kori Newkirk currently lives and works in Los Angeles. He received his BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1993 and his MFA from the University of California, Irvine in 1997. In addition to his survey at the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Pasadena Museum of California Art, his recent solo exhibitions have taken place at LAXART, Los Angeles (2008), The Project, New York (2006), MC, Los Angeles (2006), the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (2005), and Locust Projects, Miami, Florida (2005). Notable group exhibitions include the 2006 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, DAK’ART: 7th Dakar Biennial in Dakar, Senegal (2006), the traveling exhibition Uncertain States of America (2005-6), the 2004 California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach, California, the Seattle Art Museum in Seattle Washington, and the San Diego Museum of Art in San Diego, California (2003).