Kelly Kaczynski
Transparent activities and everyday surroundings can encounter a secluded disruption. Just as this singular moment is of apparent monumental consideration, so too are the surroundings.
I want to play with [I am a part of] an epic landscape. Here, a landscape is constructed and expanded thorough actions played by the wall, the bubbles, the squares, and the deer. A hierarchy of interactions from these elements supports the larger narrative. The relationship of parts and pieces create a context by which to compose a story.
I am concerned with disembodying the conclusion. To do this, an incongruous act must remain present. Incongruity, the uncanny appendage, adds tension to an otherwise soft narrative. A singular disruption becomes a lens by which to examine the fabricated landscape, reversing the narrative. It is the end of the story and the beginning.
—Kelly Kaczynski
Throughout the history of art, work that deals with landscape has usually been two-dimensional and representational: paintings of fields, forests, or other types of scenery. Kelly Kaczynski's work is entirely about landscape, but she chooses to create installations made up of non-representational objects to suggest, rather than reflect, the world outside our bodies. She is an abstract landscape sculptor who inserts carefully orchestrated sets of objects, materials, textures, and colors into existing places (in this case a museum gallery) to effect a radical transformation. Her primary interest in doing so is to provide a rich and complex experience for viewers based not so much on physical appearance, but more on the subjective responses of perception and emotion. Our assessments of how a landscape feels—as well as looks—is based on subtle psychological shifts as we scan the scene before us. Experiences of a floor (or ground), ceiling (or sky), expanse (or plain), corner (or niche), and the forms and objects that inhabit these spaces are subtly differentiated in our conscious and unconscious minds and profoundly influenced by our physical points of view. Kaczynski crafts a place full of unusual, ambiguous—and as the work's title suggests—uncanny visual events, free of familial landscape clues, that allows a direct confrontation with personal response at a deep level. Meaning here is open-ended, and tied more strongly to intuition than rational thought.
—Nick Capasso
Curator
Kelly Kaczynski would like to thank Scott Tiede, Sophia Göthlin, Kristen McCarthy, Sophia Janowitz, and Tri-Star Printing & Graphics Corporation for assistance with her installation Untitled; uncanny.
Please join the artist for an informal gallery talk on Saturday, August 11 at 3pm.
