Klea McKenna

Instagram: klea_mckenna

Website: http://www.kleamckenna.com

Bio: Klea McKenna is a visual artist who also makes films and writes. She is currently a Guggenheim Fellow in photography. Her work has been shown and published internationally. Her photograms are held in several public collections, including SFMOMA, LACMA, Getty Museum, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the US Embassy collection, The Mead Museum of Art and The Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Klea is represented by EUQINOM Gallery in San Francisco. In addition to her own art practice, she was co-founder and photographer at IN THE MAKE, an online arts journal that published studio visits and interviews with over 120 West Coast artists from 2011 to 2015. She is the daughter of renegade ethnobotanist Kathleen Harrison and the late psychedelic philosopher Terence McKenna. Klea lives in San Francisco with her partner and their young children. Her first monograph, Witness Mark, was published by Saint Lucy books in 2023.

Statement: In Rainbow Bruise I collapse several techniques I’ve developed over the last decade to create a hybrid approach to image-making at the intersection of photography, printmaking and painting. I misuse my medium by embossing photographic paper in an etching press then I cast raking light across its uneven surface. These works are then layered with painting and intaglio printing. While this work moves further from traditional photography, it still embraces its potent relationship to the real – formed by the medium’s complicated history with detail and truth. I use these methods to depict semi-abstract, figurative beings with a confounding blend of concrete evidence and speculative fantasy. They are composed of a vocabulary of symbolic feminine forms: breasts, weighty curves and wombs; shapes that are derived from everyday materials like consumer packaging and unfolded cardboard boxes which creates an aesthetic that blends archeological artifacts with the die-cut curves of mass production.