Athens, Ga. – Anna Kell, the Georgia Society of Contemporary Painters Visiting Graduate Artist, will present a gallery talk at the Lamar Dodd School of Art on Tuesday, March 31, at 7 p.m. The talk will be held in the Graduate Drawing and Painting Gallery (room S365). Kell will discuss and answer questions about her work, which is currently on display in the gallery.
Kell’s work draws on stylized representations of nature-the second-hand experience of the natural world presented through National Geographic photographs, landscape paintings, Victorian wallpapers, patterned textiles, postcards, among other means-to address issues of cultural misunderstanding of nature and dependence upon it.
Kell makes paintings and collages in which appropriated images of nature are obscured by silhouetted forms that have been placed/painted on top of them and between the image and the viewer.
“I feel that our perspectives about nature are rapidly shrinking,” says Kell. “As the world becomes increasingly transglobal, mediated versions of nature are more easily circulated and consumed. Not only is this sense of compression guided by the marketplace but also by the dwindling bio-diversity of our planet. The silhouetted structures in my work represent the presence of a highly controlling mediator, limiting our perception while exemplifying the cold distance and inescapable entanglement that can characterize our relationship with nature.”
The Georgia Society of Contemporary Painters is a collaborative of painting graduate students at the Lamar Dodd School of Art. The school is located at 270 River Road, Athens, Georgia 30602. For more information, see art.uga.edu.
