I Wonder (2021)
I WONDER is a large scale wall-text painting that was installed at Art Metropole from 2021-2024. This installation came out of two projects I worked on with my late husband, Garry Neill Kennedy, in the last year of his life while he was in long-term care: Quarentine Countdown (Louis Brier Home & Hospital, March 2021) and the initial, partial installation of I WONDER (Parkview care facility, July 2021).
For Quarantine Countdown, an incremental wall-re-painting, I timed the work to correspond with Garry's 14-day COVID isolation period at Louis Brier where he lived during his early months of long-term care. Here, I measured the perimeter of the room and every day I painted one fourteenth of it the white of our condo, making it increasingly brighter and more like home. I thought the process would be stimulating for Garry, since he was so familiar with the tools required for painting: ruler, pencil, level, paint and rollers. Permission to paint while the room was likely only granted because of COVID as staff realized how difficult the restrictions were for residents and anything that made things easier was open for consideration. However, I was asked not to paint to the top of the walls, so I left a four-inch frieze. In the end, this administrative limitation, showing the paint colour history of the room, helped to distinguish the work as art.
When Garry moved to Parkview in May of 2021, he had his own large bathroom with ample space for lifts and wheelchairs. It showed its years of use with plenty of scuffs, dents and scrapes from mobility aids bumping into the walls. Building on Quarantine Countdown, I proposed to the administration the idea of making a wall-text painting which would read "I Wonder" in this space. After a few weeks, permission came through. I completed patching the dents and repairing the walls, Garry passing me a cloth or sandpaper, then painted over this with a couple of coats of the white of our home.
Late in Garry's life, he would often say, "I wonder, wonder..." I liked to interpret this as a summary of his expansive life and his wide-ranging conceptual art practice—how he'd exceeded the bounds with his imagination, and still kept wondering. For the colour palette, I was drawn to the quiet floating shapes of Garry's white on off-white imperfection paintings (1975). I chose an off-white that matched the paper that has been discoloured with age.
I made an I WONDER mockup drawing in Superstar Shadow, Garry's signature font, and started taping it out. He would look on as I measured and taped. I had often assisted Garry in making his large paintings, but had never participated in the initial drawing and measuring. This process took time and Garry was failing. I only got part way through before he passed away.
After Garry's death, I still wanted to complete the work and so I was grateful when Jonathan Middleton, Director at Art Metropole (Toronto), agreed enthusiastically to my proposal to make a large I WONDER wall painting for the Remembering Garry Memorial Celebration. Art Met has been an artist book distributor since the 1970s, including NSCAD Press books and Garry's own printed matter. I painted the complete version of I WONDER with Mark Bell and Eric Glavin, painters who had worked on other wall-text paintings for Garry over the years.