Artist Profile
Kevin Kilroy
Studio Resident (2018, 2019)
Statement of Work
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My writing feeds off the magic of the chance encounter. I am a flâneur walking through my dreams, looking for chairs in alleys, interrogating storefronts. I am a radio receiving transmissions. I am a city writing books. I am a detective at work in the liminal channels, philosophizing apartments, watching human’s transgressions in the streets. My books deal with walking, with gentrification, with appropriation, power, artists, with the American city at the turn of the 21st century.
The Chicago Window (Spuyten Duyvil 2020) offers a formal innovation upon the trilogy— structured similar to the eponymous architectural phenomenon it consists of two double-hung sash novellas flanking a fixed center novel. My writing has been described as “a philosophical mystery set in a city where keys are plenty but locks are few.” “Funny. Really funny—in that absurdist humor way.” “Two-parts pulp, one-part Genet, with a twist of Beckettian humor.” “This is what would happen if Nelson Algren and Thomas Pynchon pulled an all-nighter at a Chicago laundromat to write a novel.”