Threshold brings together the work of Kevin Demery & Andrew Pequeño in an exhibition that explores the passage between memory and material, presence and absence, rupture and repair. Both artists engage with personal and collective histories shaped by displacement, incarceration, and generational trauma, constructing visual worlds where the remnants of the past linger—ghostlike, tender, and unresolved.
Andrew Pequeño’s mixed media works, rooted in the Chicano carceral tradition of paños, use soft, unconventional materials to reframe inherited narratives through gestures of care and transformation. His dreamlike figures exist in liminal spaces, suspended between loss and longing.
Demery’s sculptural and installation-based practice reactivates historical artifacts and symbols of Black American life, recontextualizing them within poetic and fragmented environments. Through acts of assemblage, he creates sites of both mourning and resistance.
Together, their work speaks to the weight of what we carry across generations—and the thresholds we cross to remember, reimagine, and heal.
Kevin Demery
Artist Statement
I've always found poetry in objects that convey multiple histories, objects that, through context and placement, drastically change meaning. For this reason, I use a wide variety of media rooted in traditions of assemblage. My practice triangulates intimate examinations of childhood, racial subjugation, and autobiography. I employ a kitsch-like aesthetic that often veils the weight of the subject matter intentionally. I traverse a multitude of applications and presentations to draw the viewer into an environment with each piece. This is done as a means to evince the power of the materials and imagery used to evoke curiosity into the narratives that lie within them.
An example of how I employ these methods is work that exemplifies my process, Gardens of Night, 2020. In this work, I have a coffin-like cross box that I crafted by hand, outfitted with acrylic neon tubing. The box rests atop a worn, repurposed church pew. The neon illuminates the
exterior, creating a rich black void that obscures a glass bottle holding a miniature
military-grade American flag that is meant to sit beside gravesites. The impetus behind
making this work was to create a miniature monument to the black body laid to rest in
the name of American and Christian ideals that have not sought to serve or uplift a
community inextricably tied to its histories. If read to scale, the coffin would only fit the
body of a child.
Many of my works reference history independent from a particular narrative and speak as a form of poetry to larger cultural experiences. I make these objects to interrogate Black historical narratives, acting as a haunting specter to the sociopolitical backdrop in which I find myself. I’m drawn to the arrangement of symbols to illuminate further the nuances of the histories I awaken. In this, I find links between the objects I create and my experience growing up as an African-American youth amid atmospheres riddled with political inertia, poverty, and violence.
Bio
Kevin Demery’s work explores the interplay between U.S. history and signifiers of power, developing an artistic language that invites the viewer to move between the aesthetic of his work and recurring motifs of historical violence, surveillance, and childhood trauma. He uses sculpture as a vehicle to engage audiences with iconic elements such as children’s puzzles, wind chimes, and plaster-cast hands to refer to specific histories and poetically interpret them within larger cultural experiences.
Demery received his BFA from the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, CA in 2014 and his MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Chicago, IL in 2018. He is a full-time professor at the Kansas City Art Institute in Kansas City, MO. He is one of three recipients of the 2024 Charlotte Street Visual Artist Awards and his work is currently on view at the Nelson Atkins Museum in Kansas City as part of the award exhibition. He also participated in the Delta Triennial at the Arkansas Museum of Fine Art in Little Rock, AR and Art Cologne in Cologne, Germany with Sakhile&Me Gallery in 2024.
Andrew Mcilvaine
Artist Statement
As a Mexican American interdisciplinary artist, my practice investigates the intersection of trauma, cultural identity, and regional specificity—particularly how these forces shape the social and psychic landscapes of the South and Southwest United States. My work is grounded in narrative, drawing from personal memory, inherited histories, and familial mythologies to create visual languages that are both intimate and expansive.
Through drawing, installation, and material experimentation, I construct images and objects that occupy a space between the sacred and the everyday. Infused with spiritual symbolism and folkloric references, these works engage the ongoing effects of settler colonialism—its disruption of culture, language, and belonging—and the generational reverberations it leaves behind.
I am interested in what happens at the edges of identity: at cultural and physical borders, where displacement and assimilation collide. My work asks how home is remembered or reimagined, and what it means to carry both loss and resilience across generations.
Bio
Andrew Pequeño is a Mexican American interdisciplinary artist whose work investigates themes of displacement, cultural memory, and the shifting nature of identity. Born in San Antonio, Texas, and now based in Detroit, Mcilvaine explores how home, language, culture, and even one’s name can be fractured or redefined through migration, settler colonialism, and generational movement. His practice is rooted in the personal, drawing from familial narratives to examine the psychological terrain of loss, resilience, and belonging.
Pequeño earned his BA in Studio Art from the University of Missouri–Kansas City and later received his MFA in Painting and Drawing from Washington University in St. Louis. His work spans drawing, sculpture, and installation, often incorporating symbolic materials such as sand, Mexican iconography, and consumer objects like Nikes to navigate the layered complexities of personal and cultural transformation.