by: Ellen C. Caldwell
for Artvoices Magazine
Kenny Cole is about one quarter of the way through creating a 450-panel series called “Flood.” His medium is gouache, paper, and verbiage, taken from both the Bible and the comments section from an online article. With humor and a keen intelligence, Cole’s work challenges viewers to consider the flood of imagery, verbose interactions, and daily struggles to find humanity in this growing digital age. Cole and I discussed his process and inspiration for his growing body of both political and profound works.
Ellen Caldwell: In your recent series “Flood,” you juxtapose Internet commentary following an article about the alleged decline of the nomadic Moken people of Myanmar with biblical verses about Noah’s epic. These seemingly chance parallels of texts end up aligning quite beautifully and tragically in exploring the current state of both our environmental and personal communicative degradation. Highlighting the comment section of our media is so interesting to me, because I think we often see a real break down of humanity there. Could you speak to this a bit?
Kenny Cole: But, despite this I also see a genuine struggle to find truth. We are all uninformed about something, or we all hold our own set of false ideas or myths that we might not recognize or acknowledge. We may know a lot about some things but no one knows everything about everything. An astrophysicist may not know how to lay a hardwood floor for example, so he probably has no business even discussing how it’s done, though he might add an interesting insight…