Community Mythology

*note: This article was originally published in the program for The Five Town Massive Art Festival in January of 2006. Mikael has continued with his work capturing personal narratives on film, and his work can be found at www.mikaelkennedy.com*

During the summer of 1998 Joe Shafer showed me a zine titled "Interrupt" that contained music interviews, photography, and irreverent articles. That would be my first introduction to the creative adventure of Mikael Kennedy, and what would become Interrupt Art Productions.

At the Winter 2001 Five Town Massive Micro Mini Film Festival (which has since become too massive to be micro mini) in Bristol, Vermont, Mikael's photodocumentary "Kids Life Sucks" was the premier gallery attraction. This collection of color photographs, handmade books, and silk-screened patches documented his time traveling around the country, interacting with young people who were uprooted or did not fit into the traditional society mold. I have my favorite print from that exhibit hanging on my wall; part of a series of photographs of a young man in a hooded sweatshirt. In this particular image, the subjects head is just outside the frame, the light is greenish blue and there is an uneven quality to the focus. Although it may seem as though the picture has missed it's focal point, this perfectly illustrates the theme of lost children who live, somewhere outside of the frame built by our culture, a life that is literally out of focus to the eyes of the status quo, and at home in the electric shadows of city streets.

After that festival, at my family's house in Lincoln, sometime well past midnight, Mikael scaled a boulder on my family's property in order to snowskate off the top of it. This ended with him hobbling back toward the house, with what we later found out to be torn tendons, and a smile of absurdity. The morning after this incident, Mikael hiked down the driveway to his car, leaning on a staff for support. This image stays with me when I think of Mikael: ambitious yet humble, with a supportive sense of humor. These traits allow him to capture the overlooked beauty of an everyday experience.

This is the magic of "Still, Not Dead", Mikael's latest gallery series, which has also been collected into a book. This collection reads like a mythology of people I know, people I might like to meet, people I may never encounter and people I have never met, but feel as though I have known all along. This collection tells the story of the present moment, populated by its own great heros. In an era when the grand narratives have been deconstructed into post-modern oblivion, Mikael presents a simple response, a personal narrative positioned to carry its own weight. These faces look out to us in a statement of their existence, with no further qualification needed. That we are given names to the faces allows us to experience them as community, so that we might say hello if we met them in the course of our own lives.