They were twin sisters. From the 1970s, Colleen and Kathleen Kenyon got involved in photography, as a duo or solo: two pretty brunettes, two drops of water, who looked at each other’s mirror, while each developing, a personal approach to the medium.
Born ten minutes apart on August 6, 1951, American girls tried their hand at all the arts from an early age. Painting, ceramics, weaving, they benefit from the energetic artistic community of Woodstock (New York State), where they spend their summers. From 10 to 14 years old, they also act as child models, an experience that will leave its mark. Even before their 20s, they launched into photography, nourished by the struggles of the second feminist wave.
With biting irony, Kathleen appropriates and subverts the feminine clichés conveyed by the mass media, to compose photomontages close to both pop art and surrealism. To design them, she searches through bags filled with images cut out from the press and classified by theme: a bag for flowers, one for food, another for medical and one for body fragments (“lips, eyes, ears”, is it labeled).
-As an admirer of Hannah Höch, a figure of Dada collage, she never stops arranging, superimposing, recomposing them, to question the conventions of the nuclear family. And, of course, her twinning. Produced in 1978, her series “Fitting” features her with or without her sister, getting dressed, with innocuous gestures devoid of eroticism but full of absurdity. It will be unveiled in the legendary Woman’s Building in Los Angeles, an artistic center founded by feminist art pioneer Judy Chicago.
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