Acrylic on Board, 2024

In It Was the Last Slumber Party, I wanted to capture the moment where innocence begins to unravel. The painting grew out of my interest in personal, stream-of-consciousness compositions and objects I tie to my childhood—treats, foods, toys, events, animals, bright colors—that, when recontextualized, slip from comfort into distortion. I layered these elements so that they oscillate between nostalgia and unease, reflecting the threshold where safety gives way to something more fragile, unstable, and charged with anxiety.

For me, this piece is about how memory transforms over time, how the images that once represented joy can become entangled with fear, hallucination, or despair. I see each juxtaposition as an invitation for the viewer to form their own connections, to locate their own thresholds between delight and dread. The work is both deeply personal and intentionally open, a hallucinatory landscape where objects carry shifting meanings depending on who encounters them.

© Ken Marold USA, Inc. All rights reserved.

PXL_20220318_163918395

acrylic, ink, plywood

status : complete

Architecture

Design + Fabrication

Art + Code

© [wpsos_year] Ken Marold USA, Inc. All rights reserved.

Acrylic on Board, 2023

In Dixieland Death Cult, I wanted to capture the feverish spectacle of a society in decay. The painting grew out of the feeling that politics has become a theater of cruelty, where rage and fear masquerade as conviction. It is a portrait of moral collapse disguised as patriotic fervor, a vision of a culture circling itself in celebration of its own destruction. The figures twist and rot, their gestures both triumphant and hollow, their energy feeding on entropy. What begins as a ritual of belonging turns into a ceremony of erasure, a grotesque parade where empathy is the first casualty.

This work reflects a world where belief and brutality have fused into performance, where spectacle replaces substance and death becomes entertainment. The scene is filled with color and motion, yet everything inside it feels suffocated, stripped of tenderness, stripped of meaning. I wanted the composition to feel claustrophobic and seductive at the same time, like a flame that both draws and consumes. Beneath the surface, it speaks to what happens when power is worshipped without conscience, when identity becomes a weapon, and when the desire for purity leads to ash.

© Ken Marold USA, Inc. All rights reserved.

Acrylic on Board, 2023

Tectonic Bodies is a series that investigates the layered relationships between anatomy, architecture, and machinery. In these works, organic structures are reframed as constructed landscapes: ribs suggest archways, vertebrae rise like stepped terraces, and ocular cavities become apertures or voids in a tectonic wall. The paintings hover between portrait and structure, where bone shifts into panelized surfaces and muscle into modular skin, evoking a hybrid language of flesh, steel, and engineered form. These works capture the tension of bodies understood not only as living matter, but also as sites of architecture and mechanical extension.

In Tectonic Bodies No. 1, anatomical references emerge through the suggestion of a skull-like cranium, eye sockets reimagined as cavernous portals, and a spinal ascent that recalls a stair rising through bone. The painting oscillates between recognition and abstraction, leaving the viewer unsure if they are encountering a face, a ruin, or a machine. By interlacing stone-like textures, robotic rhythms, and corporeal fragments, the series repositions the body as a tectonic artifact—something simultaneously ancient and futuristic, fragile and monumental.

© Ken Marold USA, Inc. All rights reserved.