The Tasting Room brings together new paintings by Abbi Kenny in which shellfish, martini olives, fruit, serving platters, and ornamental excess accumulate into layered compositions shaped by touch, preparation, and display. Drawing from meals she cooks, seafood markets, family recipes, historical cookbooks, and personal archives, Kenny constructs paintings that feel simultaneously seductive, humorous, and slightly uncanny. Working with raw pigment, pumice, glitter, mica, glass beads, and semi-precious stones, she builds densely layered surfaces through sanding, masking, pouring, and abrasion, causing illusionistic imagery to fracture into accumulations of texture and material residue. Decorative borders, checkerboards, marbled surfaces, and saturated patterns compete with carefully rendered objects, allowing the paintings to shift between still life, collage, advertisement, and staged display. Throughout the exhibition, food hovers between appetite, ornament, ritual, and performance as meaning emerges slowly through repetition, juxtaposition, and material transformation.
