LOCKSET
Matt Kenyon
When houses change hands, so do keys. In Lockset (2020), the keys are also portraits of housing activists, people who have been evicted and have gone public to protest, and homeowners in neighborhoods with high rates of foreclosure. These keys allow a portrait of the previous owner to covertly remain inside the lock of their home, even if the property has changed hands. These portraits also allow locks to be rekeyed to match the key portrait, acknowledging the ownership history of a house.
“…the keys are present, hung unceremoniously on the wall. The front doors they once opened are now sealed against their former denizens, tenants evicted from their residences due to desperate circumstances. Next to the more audacious works in the show, this one seems oddly diffident until you realize that each key’s jagged edge casts a small shadow of its owner’s profile on the wall. The locks have been re-keyed (by Kenyon himself, who learned locksmithing for the project) to embed subversively and permanently their tenants’ identities into the physical lives of their former homes. It’s probably a more subtle and sentimental act of defiance than the landlords it indicts could ever appreciate, but that only serves to underscore the brutality of the system that demands it.”
-Shasti O’Leary Soudant in “Matt Kenyon’s Empathy Machines” for Cornelia Magazine, published January, 2022