What Calm!

Kelly McConnell

feb. 13 - March 29, 2025
Artist Talk: March 13, 6pm

About the Show

In Kelly McConnell’s What Calm!, the artist invites the viewer into an experiential journal of her emotional and spiritual journey across a period of time, as expressed in a unique semiotics where mark functions as sign and color as symbol. Though quirky and personal to her, McConnell’s visual language often incorporates or alludes to Eastern spirituality and Greek mythology, as well as a type of coded and decidedly feminist “body language” in the presence of figural forms and isolated body parts in some of the work. What’s signified feels simultaneously personal and universal, intimate and archetypal, corporeal and cosmic, ephemeral and eternal. Meaning sometimes seems open and obvious and other times veiled. The artist’s struggle to maintain a sense of wholeness and equanimity in these troubling times, as an individual and as a part of the human collective, is both felt and observed.

Featured Artist

Featured

Kelly McConnell

Kelly McConnell is a dynamic artist and educator whose studio practice is complemented by community-based social justice work.

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.