Finchwell Revisited (1983)

In the early 1980s, during his time as the President of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Kennedy was given a stack of 1940s and 50s Saturday Evening Post and Collier’s magazines. He noticed their numerous workplace / office-based single-panel "gag" cartoons, and set about gathering them as a way to speak about hierarchies and boss / employee dynamics. 

In 1983, Finchwell, Finchwell, Finchwell, Finchwell & Osborn was exhibited in a rented office space in the same building as Eye Level Gallery (Halifax). Kennedy organized and displayed the cartoons in the spaces he identified as the boss’ office, reception, and office pool. The title of the work came from a cartoon by Harry Mace (see image 4). A “corrected” version of the door sign was painted by a contracted sign painter for the exhibition (image 5 and 6), drawing on Kennedy's interest in expanding the borders between "fine art" painting and painting as a trade. 

Kennedy extended this work in Finchwell Continued (Or Gallery, Vancouver, 1985). This installation consisted of four sets of painted large-scale heads selected from cartoons displayed in the "boss’s office" at Eye Level Gallery. This time, rather than show the original cartoons, their captions were integrated as a long line of stamped dymo tape running through the characters eyes. These captions were later reproduced in Kennedy’s 1986 C Magazine article which was paired with “Boss Symbolism,” a faux review by Robin Peck. While submitted by Peck, this review was crafted by Kennedy; lifted from a section of an essay Jeff Wall's wrote on the work of Dan Graham with Kennedy swapping Wall’s original term “Vampire” for his project-specific “Boss.” The story goes that Wall's article had been published in C Magazine prior to Kennedy's "review," a precursor to his 1991 essay “Dan Graham’s Kammerspiel," which further teased out themes of vampirism in relation to urbanist architectural discussions.

In later iterations of the work, including Finchwell Continued in Garry Neill Kennedy: Wall Paintings & Related Works exhibition (Owens Gallery, Sackville, 1996), and Work of Four Decades (National Gallery of Canada/The Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, 2000; Beaverbrook Art Gallery, 2001), as well as Finchwell Revisited 1985/2016 in Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures (Vancouver Art Gallery, 2016), Kennedy used “Imperial Yellow” to further define the power dynamics at play in the work. This was the same colour he used for both The Suit and Shouting Heads, interpreting it as “Boss Yellow” in the context of the Finchwell works.