Kicking the Ladder

Kicking the Ladder

Kicking the Ladder is an installation of over a thousand champagne glasses in a nearly complete pyramid. Each glass contains a miniature model of a house cast out of a material the Kenyon has developed with the same refractive index as water, making the houses invisible when they are submerged. Kicking the Ladder is responding to the ongoing American crisis of property that has lost its value due to the effects of extreme weather. By contrasting the opulent image of a champagne glass pyramid with the crisis of climate change and rising flood risk, Kicking the Ladder creates a visual metaphor for the fragility hidden within the current housing market. This crisis is already part of the lexicon —when someone owes more than a house is worth, people say the mortgage is “underwater.”

“Framed by a spotlight, a towering pyramid of overly full champagne glasses tempts the fates. Were this a wedding reception and not a gallery, one could easily picture a small excited ring-bearer drunk on attention and non-alcoholic punch bringing it down in a cataclysm of booze-drenched shards. Looking carefully, the imagined cries and tinkling glass fade away, and we realize there is indeed cataclysm. But it is slow, quiet, and inexorable. At the bottom of every glass in Matt Kenyon’s elegant and brutal Kicking the ladder lies a drowned American Dream—a tiny transparent effigy of a house, immersed in water, nearly invisible but for its refracted outline, plopped into a cruel celebratory landscape. A ghostly flyer lies at our feet, sneering with opportunistic intent: “We Buy Houses.”

-by Shasti O’Leary Soudant Sculpture Magazine Feb 2023