Kelly Allen “You are the World”

Bold Hype Gallery

poster for Kelly Allen “You are the World”

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Bold Hype Gallery presents “You are the World” new works by Kelly Allen. Ten percent of the proceeds will be donated to the American Red Cross Hurricane Sandy Disaster Relief.

This new exhibition delivers Kelly Allen’s signature style of immaculately painted, trompe l’oeil compositions of colorful, graphic, nature-centric clusters of diversity. Derived from collage sketches in a range of subject, scale, and media, the work draws the viewer in through skillful craftsmanship and holds one there to uncover the mysteries of her arrangements. Working in oils, gouache, and colored pencils, Allen’s meticulous renderings of flora and fauna merge with hard-edged stripes, dots, and drips to reveal secret stories to the individual, and echo ancestral beliefs that pay respect to our fellow creatures that inhabit the earth.

Simultaneously, Allen takes us further down her path by introducing an accompanying series of anthropomorphic works that feature face- and mask-like compositions, some of which blend abstract gestural strokes with tightly rendered human and nonhuman features. Reflecting on power through economy of form, the artist reduces the number of elements down to an essential minimalism, shifting the emphasis from physical abundance to consciousness and energy. Greatly inspired by the book, The Secret Life of Plants, Allen considers the level of awareness in non-human life forms. The artist adds, “Realizing that plants, insects, and other life forms are much more perceptive than humans recognize, adds depth and a magical dimension to life. Everything is interconnected and is communicating in a multitude of languages and systems. The implications are limitless.”

Kelly Allen was born south of Detroit, Michigan in 1979 and currently lives and works in the San Francisco Bay area. She first attended The Memphis College of Art in 1998, where she studied textiles. She then went on to earn a BA in Painting in 2003 from Humboldt State University and an MFA in Drawing from Kendall College of Art and Design in 2007, in addition to attending artist residencies at Ox-Bow of The Art Institute of Chicago, and Harold Arts of Chicago, IL.

Having focused in many different artistic disciplines, Allen had been drawn to textiles, printmaking, and sculpture, before devoting herself to painting, drawing, and collage. The artist discovered her current body of work while making collages at an artist’s residency. A particular work fueled a desire for her to make a drawing of it, in order to study it and know it more deeply. This began a series that has developed over the past five years. Working in a multi-step process, she begins with making a collage from her large archive of images, which serves as a blueprint for her painting. Allen then meticulously creates a photorealistic painting of the collage, intentionally mimicking the appearance of a collage to achieve a slickness that often tricks the viewer. Working in oil on canvas, gouache, and colored pencil on paper, she produces trompe l’oeil images, composed with a meditative-like focus on the notion of the interconnection. Allen’s works feature many creatures and elements from the natural and human realms, spun together with hard-edged graphic shapes in bold, bright hues and patterns. This intricate body of work conjures an idiosyncratic sense of symbolism, asking the viewer to create new connections and relationships between concrete and abstract ideas, with a focus on respect for the natural world.

Media

Schedule

from November 15, 2012 to December 15, 2012

Opening Reception on 2012-11-15 from 18:00 to 21:00

Artist(s)

Kelly Allen

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