Kelly McConnell

Kelly McConnell is a dynamic artist and educator whose studio practice is complemented by community-based social justice work. Engagement in visual culture is balanced in individual painted works that embrace the body, private self, cycles of repetition, and metaphysical worlds.

Kelly holds a BA from Gettysburg College, an MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art, and a Certificate in Advanced Education Leadership from Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Kelly has held solo exhibitions at Cove Street Arts (Portland, ME), Mayo Street Arts (Portland, ME), Three Fish Gallery (Portland, ME), Engine (Biddeford, ME), at the Frank Brockman Gallery (Brunswick, ME); and has been included in select group exhibitions at ICA at MECA+D (Portland, ME), SPACE Gallery (Portland, ME), Able Baker Contemporary (Portland, ME), as well as other exhibitions in Maryland, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, USA.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Every Mark

My paintings are about time, a systematic record of time, and representations of my life through an allegorical selection of colors. My paintings are realistic in their expression in that they are about me. Rather than a narrative, I have painted an emotional record and a collection of paths and journeys. Reflected in the paint, I see through fog, sheets of water, or a veil, depicted with multiple layers of color or marks. These layers are how I experience my life. The accumulation of marks becomes the painting.

What is happening in our nation, and my disgust with individualism over the collective good, is at odds with the serene systems I once embraced, an artist alone, in my studio. It no longer works to compartmentalize the world around me to make sense of it. Porous representations of my own body have emerged in my mark marking, and I have let them stay and witness. I have teased these images off the canvas or paper surface and rearranged them in the environment.

In this life, when we all work and try to make meaning, these paintings represent my disequilibrium as an artist hovering in the world, trying to make things whole.

C.V. here