Young Adult Living
CURATED BY KELSEY MAGNUSON
JANUARY 11TH - FEBRUARY 15TH, 2019
Young Adult Living, curated by Kelsey Magnuson, uses portraiture to examine hierarchies traditionally embedded within representation; both who is represented and how. No religion, no royalty, no noble working class or peasantry, the works presented in Young Adult Living collectively call into question the conventions of traditional portraiture.
Exhibiting artists Kelsey Magnuson, Nick Clark, Alyce Carrier, and Keegan VanGorder, examine the portrait’s impulse to faithfully depict the human form by interrogating the space between a subject’s immediate physical presence and the impression it leaves behind. Through ceramics, textiles, photography, drawing, painting, and printing processes, they find wiggle room within that space to create more expansive depictions of human experience with all its flaws and mundane lulls.
This exhibition was presented with the support of the Nebraska Arts Council and the Nebraska Cultural Endowment.
Installation Images
Photos: Debra S. Kaplan
About the Artists
Alyce Carrier’s background is in sculpture and ceramics but she also experiments with printmaking and stop motion animation. Her work is a sparse and delicate treatment of the mundanity of routine and the day to day. It reads like an intimate social encounter; lending an insight to a sense of self without abusing sincerity. She currently lives in Minneapolis; come visit any time.
Kelsey Magnuson is an Omaha based-artist recently returned from North Carolina where she first started working with film photography and later focusing on woven textiles. Her work with handwoven photographs is a combination of these two practices--cutting personal portraits and moments then weaving them back together alter the once still image through warp faced threads that obscure, conceal, pixelate and mimic the relationship of cloth on the body. These honest and intimate photographs, obscured and highlighted, touch on our collective and individual portrayals of self. They address cloth as a second skin with the capacity of carrying our histories and memories along with them.
Keegan Van Gorder is an artist living in Minneapolis. Her arts background spans mediums including textiles, ceramics, screenprinting, digital illustrations and goofwork. Her illustrative work focuses on vulnerability and celebrating the honest unflattering parts of being human - odd shaped bodies, hair, hygiene, fatigue, real life. She draws content inspiration from small everyday experiences and her freaky community of friends and family.
Nicholas Clark is a 2D multimedia artist living and working in Omaha, Nebraska. His imagery is autobiographical, akin to self portraiture, wherein he is substituted by pinball interactions between subjects of the composition, engaged with or disengaged from friends and family. Clark’s work solves emotional memory puzzles, replacing missing pieces with symbolism, both redeeming and damning.