NYAB Event - Kelsey Shwetz “#tbt”

Kelsey Shwetz “#tbt”

Christopher Stout Gallery

This event has ended.

For her first New York solo exhibition, Kelsey Shwetz recasts the historical collapse inherent to #tbt to gesture beyond the studies of gaze and the female body prominent in her early work; toward the mysteries of memory, and the intersection of mind and matter.

Drawn from photographs of varying provenance, from a found family portrait to rediscovered iPhone snapshots, the canvases of #tbt see Shwetz deploying a dazzling array of formal and compositional means to bring her own history with the figures of each image back into the picture: A night of collective sexual joy is reimagined as a complexly rendered theatrical tableaux in which character is relational without succumbing to tidy narratives. A friend on the verge of departing New York radiates in and as searing geranium red, a minimalist monument in flux rejecting any distinction between figure and ground. A family of four poses at home, the clean geometry of a known, domestic space held in tension with hazy figures rendered alien by time. Presented alongside these four large works are selections from a series of smaller canvases which foreground the analog collage process central to Shwetz’s compositions.