Devin Kenny

Born 1987 in Chicago

Devin Kenny uses music, performance, video, writing, fashion design, and almost any other means possible to explore and complicate ideas on contemporary culture. Kenny’s work often exists online, as websites, blogs, video posts, and audio files. Employing the tropes of social media–driven youth culture to reach a base audience, the work is free to convey broad ideas while subversively inserting political and philosophical theory. There is a hyperawareness in Kenny’s work that belies his sincerity in making it, an ironic stance that separates what he makes from the pop culture that it mimics. Kenny uses the Internet as source material and venue, consuming and processing cultural production to reveal it anew to his audience.

Kenny makes his audio work under the alter ego Devin KKenny (a play on the fact that an unfamous name often can be misspelled), creating music that combines sounds from rap, hip-hop, electronica, and dance genres with lyrics that refer to art making and history. The combination results in fun and alluring music on a superficial level that also draws deeper parallels between the art and the music worlds.