OPENING RECEPTION: Saturday, July 12th, 7-10pm (Open to the public, FREE)

Kinsey/DesForges is pleased to present Slightly All the Time, an exhibition of new paintings, book sculptures, and an on-site installation (the first since his installation at Rice University Gallery last summer) from Los Angeles artist Mike Stilkey. This will be Stilkey's second solo showing with the gallery. The exhibition opens with a reception on July 12th from 7-10pm, and continues through August 16th, 2008.

While Mike Stilkey’s forlorn and whimsical figures are reminiscent of Egon Schiele’s attenuations and Edward Gorey’s punctilious knack for the slightly off-kilter, they always retain a knowing sense of the built, painterly surface and its edges. Instantly recognizable as Stilkey's own, the paintings are rendered in delicate yet not-too-precious splashes of black ink and vibrant color, populated with femme fatales and top-hatted dandies that yearn for something just beyond the frames that encase them. His book sculptures allow these narratives to be experienced with added volume: by stacking vintage, discarded books to create a threedimensional canvas, the work becomes both painting and sculpture; Stilkey's towers of printed matter emphatically stress their objectness—their bulk, weight, size, and physicality. But as he paints over bent spines and across covers, he equally privileges books as vessels of information, able to carry the abstract claims of both authors and their readers, as well as the burden of text and image. The effect is one that simultaneously papers over the past life of these books and reinvests them with new life as a media for building up new images and narratives, particularly befitting the mysterious figures and hieroglyphic narratives that Stilkey draws together with paint and pen.

The second since his Summer 2007 Rice University Gallery exhibit, When the Animals Rebel, and his first such installation in Los Angeles, Stilkey’s on-site installation for Slightly All the Time will be made up of walls of vintage books capturing landscapes of day-to-day existence. Stilkey has set himself the task of finding the sometimes elusive brilliance in the banal—what the artist describes as “those small things that provide motivation for us to do the same things, over and over, every day.” Whether by resuscitating books from their discarded status or by putting pen to paper to bring his spindly forms to life, it is a current that will charge the installation as a whole, just as it does the rest of Stilkey’s oeuvre.

Stilkey was born in 1975 and raised in and around Los Angeles, CA, where he continues to live and work. He received an Associate Degree from Santa Monica College in 1997. His work has been shown across the United States and in Europe, most recently in Bern, Switzerland. In addition to his book, One Hundred Portraits, published in 2005, he has been featured in Exit Strategy magazine, Paper Pushers and BLK/MRKT One and Two.