P R E S S R E L E A S E
Klea McKenna, Untitled (cascade) from the series Rainbow Bruise, 2023, Unique photographic relief. Embossed silver gelatin photogram and fabric dye., 41 x 32 in
VESSEL Julia Goodman & Klea McKenna
September 7 - October 28, 2023
Opening Reception: Saturday, September 9, 1:30 - 4:00 PM
EUQINOM Gallery is pleased to present Vessel, a two person exhibition with new works from Julia Goodman and Klea McKenna. Vessel will be on view from September 7 through October 28th with an opening reception on Saturday, September 9 from 1:30-4 pm. Both artists will be in attendance.
Vessel brings together two gallery artists, and long-time friends, for the first time in a two person exhibition at EUQINOM. Julia Goodman and Klea McKenna are both Bay Area-based artists whose work centers time and its relationship to our human experience. While working in markedly different mediums, the artists overlap in their innovative and intimate relationship to their material processes, which are shaped by years of experimentation and adaptation. In their textural and low relief works, they also share subject matters – short and long time, bodies, human connection, caretaking, and transformation. Vessel is a presentation of two artists using their personal experiences to explore the sublime in the hard work of caring for and carrying on for each other, our children, and future generations.
Julia Goodman, Farther and Farther (III), 2023, Watercolor on hand formed paper. Pulp made from different color repurposed bedsheets and t-shirts, 22.50 x 17.50 x 0.50 in
Losing my father in 2007 drove me towards texture and innovative ways of working sculpturally with pulp. Having a child in 2019 deepened my connection to fabrics from domestic spaces and reawakened me to color. The two experiences were not opposite ends of a spectrum, but instead, neighboring experiences in rawness and care. In both moments I looked to the night sky to remember how short this time is, how the smallest moments and gestures accumulate into microcosms that are universes unto themselves. - Julia Goodman
Julia Goodman has been working for over a decade at the intersection of paper making, textiles and sculpture. Her signature hand formed paper is made with connections to a historical rag paper making process associated with women and invisible labor. The pulped and torn fabrics that constitute the multicolored substrate of her works are made from bed sheets and t-shirts–fabrics that lie close to bodies, day and night. These textiles are transformed into two and three dimensional works, through an extended manual process Goodman has shaped and refined over many years. Recently, Goodman embraced painting as an additional layer in her work. In Vessel, her applications of watercolor seamlessly blend with the complex topographies of her textured surfaces creating high contrast yet ethereal beams of highlights and shadows. At other times her concentric watercolor edges are crisp connotations of celestial rings and rhythms. Interconnectedness, interdependence, love, grief, death and birth are the themes she imbues into her abstracted forms and surfaces. Largely driven by the relationships and cycles of her life, Goodman’s work addresses the personal and intimate business of being alive and together with other people and the spaces left when loved ones go before us.
I am looking for icons or even for representations of the kind of feminine power and transformation that is needed to sustain and thrive through this impossible moment. Icons that are not fleeting or one dimensional; that are not telling me how to contour my make-up to look younger or giving me a script for gentle parenting. I need Idols that have the wisdom of adaptation and are built for centuries both past and future. Proof that we can turn ourselves inside out and still remain whole. -Klea McKenna
Klea McKenna’s latest work collapses many of the innovative techniques she’s developed over her career to create a hybrid approach to image making. The use of raking light on embossed photographic paper remains the foundation of her process, which is now joined by painting, collage and intaglio printing. Her new work moves further from traditional photography, while still embracing many of its technical principles and its potent relationship to the real – formed by the medium’s articulation of detail and complicated history with evidence and truth. In Vessel, McKenna’s photographic reliefs are anchored by semi-abstract, figurative forms that conjure a symbolic feminine glossary of breasts, nipples, weighty curves and wombs. Cast in light and shadow and layered with jewel and earth tones, her handmade shapes are derived from everyday materials of casual consumption like unfolded cardboard packaging which conjure both archeological finds and mass production. She transforms these found objects into objects she’d like to find. In a time of impending collapse at the frayed ends of late-stage capitalism, these works toe the line of speculative fiction where McKenna has invented an iconography to satisfy her own needs and the imagined needs of the generations that succeed her. These images locate the female body in questions about what it is to be a woman in the past, the present and the future. In these embodied forms, we are meant to divine something about the cosmic experience of birth and death, pain and pleasure, fragility and power and most hopefully, a mapping towards regeneration and resilience.
About The Artists
Julia Goodman (b. 1979, Atlanta, GA) earned an MFA from California College of the Arts (2009) and a BA in International Relations and Peace & Justice Studies from Tufts University (2001). She studied art at Santa Monica College (2002-2006). Recent exhibitions include the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington D.C.; Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco, CA; San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA; DePaul Art Museum, Chicago, IL; Berkeley Art Center, Berkeley, CA; Poetry Foundation, Chicago, IL; and California College of the Arts Hubbell Street Gallery, San Francisco, CA. Her work is included in the collections of National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C. and the DePaul Art Museum, Chicago, IL. Her residencies include JB Blunk Residency, Inverness, CA; Recology SF, San Francisco, CA; Creativity Explored, San Francisco, CA; and Salina Art Center, Salina, KS. Goodman lives and works in Berkeley with artist Michael Hall and their young child.
Klea McKenna (b. 1980, Freestone, CA) is a visual artist who writes and makes films and is known for cameraless photography and her innovative use of light-sensitive materials. She is a 2023 recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship Award for Photography. Her work is held in several public collections, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA; United States Embassy Collection; Mead Art Museum, Amherst, MA; Museum of Fine Arts Boston, MA, and The Victoria & Albert Museum, London. She studied art at UCLA, UCSC, and California College of the Arts. Klea is the daughter of renegade ethnobotanist, Kathleen Harrison and psychedelic philosopher, Terence McKenna. She lives in San Francisco with her partner and their young children.