Kenneth Millington

October 2 - November 29, 2026 | Opening Reception / Meet the Artist: Friday, October 2 / 5 - 8pm

Kenneth Millington presents a dynamic series of watercolor and ink paintings alongside a large-scale installation. His vibrant, graphic compositions explore destruction, myth, and debris, building immersive narratives from fragments of history and imagination. His work challenges us to reconsider how past events inform new stories and contemporary life.

Together alongside Chenlin Cai and Vesna Jovanovic's exhibits, a shared focus in the Gallery emerges in a dialogue on how we act, how we endure, and how our choices ripple through ourselves, others, and the planet. Visitors will move from intimate observation to bold visual narratives to luminous, contemplative installations, experiencing a rich spectrum of human stories.

Kenneth Millington's paintings and drawings express an overarching interest in entropy, the universal tendency toward chaos and disorder, and forces of turbulence, disruption within flow and velocity. While these concepts naturally align with scientific investigation, the artist is interested in how they manifest in our technology, culture and stories. Entropy and turbulence are continually present in our collective histories, narratives and discoveries. His work isolates disruptions at varying levels to explore its nature as artifact, the material and methods of its expression and our symbolic language codifying it.

As a tangible entry point to these concepts, Millington reworks the media of the comic book, with research based on his own childhood collection of 1980s and 90s comic books. Through the lens of the super-powered characters, the comics explore the human condition and societal issues forming modern-day myths. As with all myths, archetypes, challenges and consequences are present. Removing the heroes and villains leaves the aftermath of conflicts as a point of focus in the work. He collects and collages an array of random images combined with his own imagined objects. Many of these images depict destroyed spaces, collisions, explosions, debris fields and architectural remains. The result is a familiar space that has ruptured and dissolved into an entropic metaphysical landscape. These paintings and drawings map the tumult of our time and our fractured relationship to the natural world.

Foregoing traditional conventions of realistic space, objects in dramatic perspective interplay with jungle foliage and eruption clouds. Symbolic representations of concussive force and black outlines are the vocabulary used to frame out these compositions. These detached visual artifacts, and their traces of larger narratives, serve as building blocks for new ideas. The new arrangement is arrived at by intuitive and formal juxtapositions with no direct intention. In this way, a subconscious approach, the reoccurring cataclysmic archetypes of our myths and storytelling can be explored.

This series of graphic and highly saturated colors work challenges the dominance of linear sequence in narrative and underscores the connection between popular narrative forms, like comic books, to larger histories of narrative painting. Much of the theory behind the work originates in film and media studies. Inspirational to these works are the artist's experiences encountering aftermath- fossil hunting along the shores of Seneca Lake and Pre- Columbian ruins in Bolivia, his mother's home country.