55 GANSEVOORT is pleased to announce the opening of "Matt Kenny / 1515 Church", on view from May 10th through June 14th, at the gallery's storefront location.

For “1515 Church”, Kenny will exhibit a billboard advertisement for DNA paternity testing. This sculpture is a replica of a sign located on a sidewalk at 1515 Church Avenue at the juncture of one of the most culturally, economically, and architecturally diverse neighborhoods in Brooklyn. Situated near victorian mansions, a major shopping area, and Prospect Park's Parade Grounds, the billboard's startlingly negative poetry suggests an alternate psychic landscape of personal crisis. An image of a baby sits above the question 'Does he really have his father's eyes?" The formal characteristics of the sign itself, a collage of scrap conduit and steel framing, constitute a unique visual provocation on Church Avenue. Fatherhood, retail DNA testing, emblematic babies, and suspicion bluntly combine on this sidewalk in Ditmas Park.

At 55 Gansevoort, Kenny imports this 'psychic landscape' into the context of a tourist destination-- a neighborhood with a rich history, high-end restaurants and designer boutiques. Committed to the sign's integrity as an advertisement as well as its formal personality, Kenny produces a correspondence between these two very different locations provoking a variety of readings from issues of class and gentrification to notions of advertising's rich poetic power. "1515 Church" is the artist's most recent engagement with the psychological poetry of New York City's ever-changing landscape.

Matt Kenny (born 1979) earned a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Karma and Derek Eller Gallery in New York. In June 2014, he will have a solo show at Halsey McKay Gallery in East Hampton, NY.

The exhibitions at 55 Gansevoort are entirely visible, at all hours, by peering through the windowed doors.