Keltie Ferris: Man Eaters

Keltie Ferris is a postdigital painter, employing formalist strategies and materials—oil, acrylic, sprayed paint, and oil pastel—to create enigmatic and visually seductive abstractions. Her quick, gestural marks, hard-edged forms, and diaphanous passages of sprayed oil paint demonstrate rigorous investigations of spatial illusion, color, and surface texture. Motley textures, marks, and palettes hover and collide into one another, creating complex compositions of competing strata of visual information. While recalling the works of Joan Mitchell, Sigmar Polke, Ross Bleckner, or Albert Oehlen, Ferris’s methodically structured paintings uniquely evoke the digital networks and urban topographies of the twenty-first century. And, with titles such as Jobriath (the first openly gay pop star) and Lady Stardust (David Bowie’s 1972 hit), our minds are punctuated with a broad range of associations from identity politics to pop-culture icons.

Listen to a Kemper ARTcast related to the exhibition.

Above: Keltie Ferris, Cassiopeia, 2009; oil, spray paint, acrylic on canvas, 80 x 90 inches