Megan Sullivan’s collages, paintings and drawings draw upon the iconography of young men found in magazines and other sources of commercialized, contemporary masculine aesthetics. Frozen in b/w distance, unsure gestures and fragile habitus - they move on the verge of farce and enthusiastic passing fancy.

The works in this series approach the mythic figure of David Kennedy, JFK’s promising young nephew (and son of Bobby Kennedy) who died at age 29 of an overdose in a luxury hotel in Palm Beach in 1984. Today the figure of David Kennedy has grown obsolete except for a few photographs circulating in the internet, collected anonymously on a website by a still-devoted fan. In her latest series of works, Sullivan tries to subjectively relate to the person in the grainy snap shots, and shows more than anything an often hounded, sometimes broken-glamorous media figure. The tragic fate of David as a young boy watching his father on TV being shot, and his unsuccessful attempts to get off drugs and live up to the Kennedy name, haunts the otherwise romantic images, while at the same time they serve as projection surface where the depicted subject is like an unfolding grammatic structure.

Like Frederic Moreau, the hero in Flaubert’s novel, Sullivan’s works on David Kennedy epitomize a peculiar tragedy: taken from reality and nevertheless failed in it, in favour of lyrically unfulfilled ideals