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.
Kelsey Magnuson is an Omaha based artist- recently returning 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.
Exhibition Dates: January 11 - February 15, 2018
Opening Reception: Friday, January 11, 2019; 6:00 - 8:00 PM
Regular Gallery Hours: Thursday - Friday, 12:00 - 5:00 PM
Amplify Arts is a 501c3 nonprofit whose mission is to promote unity, innovation, and progress in the arts to build strong and vibrant communities. The Generator Grants Program lends space and support to Omaha-area artists throughout the process of organizing, marketing, and mounting a curated exhibition outside the context of larger institutional systems.