Artwork Review: Millicent Kennedy, "Obsolescence: Landline"
On view in the EAC Faculty Exhibition
From further away, Millicent Kennedy’s Obsolescence: Landline recalls a delightfully textured and strange landscape. The work consists of a deconstructed landline phone sewed into green chiffon and linen. Each mechanical part is surrounded by organic patterns of running stitches in lines of various blues, greens, yellows, oranges, reds, and blacks. The telephone wire snakes around the protruding lumps of the receiver like a thin river. This organic green imagery is fitting, considering the physical distance wires must cover in order to connect people through landline.
Landline is one work in Kennedy’s series Obsolescence, a collection that explores one of her enduring themes of loss. Other disused or abandoned objects incorporated into these artworks include found keys, deconstructed boom boxes, and disassembled digital cameras. As Kennedy writes on her website, many of these once common objects have been rendered obsolete by the advances of smart phones. In this work, the now rarely seen landline is memorialized in a piece that, like Kennedy’s Fossils series, both “highlights and obscures” its subject object.
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