Join us on May 21st for the opening reception of Rainbow Bruise, featuring works by Klea McKenna. The artist will be in attendance.


About the Exhibition:

Rainbow Bruise embraces the collapse that has marked our current moment. Her images reflect an arc, both personal and collective, of fragmentation and erasure followed by glimmers of hopeful reinvention. McKenna’s signature photogram techniques are in full force in Rainbow Bruise, but they are now painted on, cut into and collaged back together. This work proposes a language of new forms that suggest speculative artifacts from a remarkable moment in history. In addition, a series of digital collages that recombine the artist’s analog photogram source material will be shown as a collection of NFTs in the gallery.

McKenna begins by collecting materials that bear the marks and stains that accumulate over time through growth, trauma, devotion and human touch, then, in darkness, she embosses these objects into photographic paper. Raking light is cast across the resulting textures in an unruly process that subverts photography’s intended use by making touch more primary than sight. The embossed photograms made by pressure and light contain a confounding blend of evidence and fiction. These ‘photographic reliefs’ then become the under-paintings onto which she applies layers of fabric dye, remaking the subjects on her own terms and in her own medium. In some cases, they are then collaged by hand or re-photographed and further hybridized into digital collages. In each of these final forms she employs humor, illusion, resourcefulness and play to make new artifacts that refer to the past, but point to an imagined future.

Rainbow Bruise will be on view May 21 - August 6, 2022.

To read the full press release, click here.