Domesticity is a recurring theme for both Stuart McKenzie and Brad Kronz. Most of the objects on display have been created with techniques developed instinctively in the solitude of personal space. There is something both comforting and deeply unsettling about witnessing the minutiae of life–plastic bags, receipts, envelopes, and other abstractions made from homely materials transformed through obsessive attention and traumatic experiences. Their practices highlight the boundaries between private space and public systems that have grown increasingly porous. This erosion manifests through constant surveillance on CCTVs and phone cameras, personal data collection, careful curation of our social media algorithms, digital money and infiltration of corporate interests in our most intimate spaces. Subversive reappropriation in these works points to an attempt to restore personal autonomy through regulated, cyclical actions.
McKenzie’s works are enclosed within bright orange frames, highlighting his careful treatment of items of everyday use that people throw away. Checks, envelopes, and a plastic Tesco bag are sewn together by a way of welt, a technique for making pockets. After suffering a stroke in 2016, Stuart was constantly being sent bank statements, one after another. His recovery was spent in the council estate apartment he occupies, sewing together daily debris in a therapeutic way to help him restore cognitive functions and get back to life. This transformation of discarded materials relaxes the rage of our throwaway culture. The constant stream of banking comms, bills, and shopping bags that are consumed regardless of personal crisis. Preserving items that were designed to be forgotten he creates a counterpoint to speed and disposability. The Tesco bag says something about doing “a LITTLE BIT OF GOOD together.” That would be a great idea but it’s an impossible idea.
Alas, one’s dreams are always cliched (2018) and Glitter for Industry (2000) take us back to his career as a fashion illustrator and studio assistant at Vivienne Westwood. Having worked within the fashion industry–a system built on seasonal obsolescence and manufactured desire–McKenzie repurposes its visual language for personal expression rather than product promotion. He once worked with an agent who told him to concentrate on more iconic pieces, rather than “bread and butter” editorial pieces, so he just walked away.
In McKenzie’s early works, Who Can Out Ferry & Ferry? (1998) and And I'm Not Going To Let You Wear Me Like A Tie Pin (1988) he deftly subverts pop iconography by pretending to make album poster designs for Bryan Ferry. Titling the works much later using sentence fragments from old Japan reviews, a band he was into as a youth. Employing black printing ink, wax crayons and photocopying, Stuart refers to Bryan Ferry from Roxy Music. As if Ferry and the leopard print were fixations in Stuart's memories. His own musical career continues to this day with his current 'house poems' and also with the now defunct Wild Daughter, a post-punk band he co-founded with James Main. Words remain important to his practice, evident in his six collages presented, including: There’s Never Been a Better Time to Contact the Dead (2024), Gender Critical (2024), among others. Work titles are narrative extenders, drawing from his poetry, common idioms and collaged from food wrappers, initially inspired by the news poems of Scottish poet Edward Morgan.
In the stillness of the domestic, McKenzie and Kronz’s practices invoke the image of a solitary figure compulsively making as a response to the constant anxieties of the outside. In Kronz’s work, domestic familiarity dissolves into unsettling abstraction. His sculptures–existing ambiguously in between minimalist form and suggested domesticity–create unease through their fleeting resemblance. The lime-green box on its white pedestal suggests usefulness but denies it, its removable walls proposing versatility while refusing to be functional. These pseudo-domestic objects activate the feeling of encountering something familiar that has been subtly altered, producing the uncanny–the homely defamiliarized.
In opposition to McKenzie’s works, Kronz cuts out reference and attachment for the material presence of his constructions. His stage-like platform of plywood and fragments of carpets: the monolithic black textile creates a void in the exhibition space–an installation of presence and absence, material and negation. The void-like quality of this central installation pulls gravity around which the other works orbit, its darkness against the walls paradoxically draws attention to itself through absence. These works deal with another sort of isolation: the stodgy alienation of being amid objects whose purpose has been obscured. Kronz’s wall-mounted three-part woodwork with graphite on paper in the middle resembles a cabinet or display case that reveals only emptiness, it is a housing that cradles absence rather than content. The play between art and display in his work is self-consciously complicated–his objects will not serve their touted functions, rather drawing attention to their materiality while avoiding relational attachment.
Collecting, hoarding, and reassembling momentarily disrupt the consumer cycle, turning small acts into a lazy form of resistance. As Jean Baudrillard writes, “The most mundane object becomes a sign of rebellion when removed from its assigned function.” By repurposing discarded materials, McKenzie and Kronz reveal how domestic space is permeated by market forces. Each stitch, cut assemblage becomes an assertion of agency and reclaims control over objects designed for disposal, transforming the home into a space of creation rather than passive consumption. Their work engages with pop culture not merely as content but as a conceptual framework–understanding that the popular operates as both the machinery of consumerism and a potential site for intervention. The exhibition does not offer resolution but exposes domestic space as a site of quiet defiance, where objects are not only collected but questioned, where resistance is stitched, constructed, and made tangible in the quiet act of creation.
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"The Old Grey Liver Test", curated by Galerina.
Brad Kronz (b. 1986, San Diego, CA) is an American contemporary artist based in New York City recognized for his multidisciplinary approach, encompassing sculpture, collage, drawing, and video. Recent solo exhibitions include Gaylord Fine Arts, Los Angeles (2024); Gandt, New York (2024); Kunsthalle Friart, Fribourg, CH (2023); Lars Friedrich, Berlin, DE (2021).
Stuart McKenzie (b. 1965, London, UK) is an artist, illustrator, poet and musician. His work explores the performance of self through materiality, manifested through painting, poetry, performance and objects. McKenzie has exhibited at TG Gallery Nottingham, MIART Milan, Umwelt Mode Basel,Dinner Party Gallery Blackwing Studios London and Wc29ha. He is widely published as a poet and featured in the Laudanum Chapbook Anthology series Volume 1. He was a founding member of the band Wild Daughter who were active between 2014 – 2021. A poetry collection is forthcoming with Joan Publishing Autumn ‘25.
Maria Blok is a writer based in London.
