A.I.R. Gallery is pleased to announce To tell old tales anew, an exhibition of large-scale collages by artist Diane Kendall. The exhibition highlights Kendall’s longtime engagement with female figures from mythology, folklore, and fairy tales as a means of exploring contemporary notions of family, domesticity, myth, and memory. This is Kendall’s first solo exhibition in New York City.

Recontextualizing stories of powerful women drawn from myth and legend, Kendall’s collages stage improbable scenes that bring together images borrowed from a wide array of sources, including medieval mystic illuminations, folk art, textiles, children’s art, Victorian fairytales and nursery rhymes, Japanese woodcuts, and occasionally family members. By retelling the tales of these women and constructing for them vibrant new worlds, Kendall calls attention to the contemporary resonances of their stories, and in doing so, offers new feminist narratives.

Kendall constructs her collages using fragments of her earlier works, pulling from a diverse array of media, including printmaking (spanning intaglio, woodcut, linocut, lithography, and monotype techniques), painting, and drawing. Prioritizing the unexpected and coincidental over the precise and consistent, Kendall rebels against traditional printmaking conventions. With a smiling irreverence, she mines her prints for raw material, tearing bits and pieces for use in later collages.