EXHIBITION OPENING Friday, November 13, 2026, 5:30 – 8 PM
Maximum Overdrive explores the gap between promises of technological progress and their human and environmental costs. Matt Kenyon turns familiar objects against the systems they represent: a transparent guardrail reveals its internal stress; a champagne tower undermines the promise of trickle-down economics; vehicle warning speakers carry the noise of AI data centers; and tiny portraits embedded in thumbtacks hold community memories of neighbors disappeared by ICE. Through these unexpected transformations, Kenyon examines how systems designed to promise safety, prosperity, and connection can also produce harm and inequality. The exhibition asks who benefits from these systems, who bears their costs, and whose experiences remain visible.
Ohio Immigrant Alliance is working with artist Matt Kenyon and the Sculpture Center to provide immigrant testimonies for the artist's exhibition, and materials for the public that extend the show's message into actionable steps people can take in their communities.
About the Artist:
Matt Kenyon’s S.W.A.M.P. (Studies of Work Atmospheres and Mass Production) focuses on critical themes addressing the effects of global corporate operations, mass media and communication, military- industrial complexes, and general meditations on the liminal area between life and artificial life. SWAMP has been making work in this vein since 1999 using a wide range of media, including custom software, electronics, mechanical devices, and oftentimes working with living organisms.
Matt Kenyon is a media artist and designer. Kenyon’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in such venues as the Museum of Modern Art, New York, MOCAD Detroit, Science Gallery Dublin, Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, and the International Print Center and The Museum of Capitalism. He is a TED Fellow, a MacDowell Fellow, and his work has been awarded the FILE Prix Lux. His TED talk “A Secret Memorial for Civilian Casualties” has been viewed over 800,000 times and translated into twenty-five languages.
His work has been featured in The New York Times, Wired, and Gizmodo, and has also appeared in edited volumes such as A Touch of Code (Gestalten Press), Adversarial Design (MIT Press) and Code as Creative Medium (MIT Press). He lives and works in Buffalo, New York, where he is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art at the University at Buffalo, where he is also the director of undergraduate studies in art.
Learn more about Matt Kenyon here.