EUQINOM Gallery at FUTURE ART FAIR
BOOTH F12
with a solo presentation by Klea McKenna

May 1 - 4, 2024

Chelsea Industrial, 538 28th Street, New York City

Klea McKenna
Mammals, 2024 from the series Rainbow Bruise
Unique photographic relief (embossed silver gelatin photogram, fabric dye)
41 x 32 in (104.14 x 81.28 cm); frame 45 x 36 in (114.3 x 81.28 cm)

Klea McKenna’s latest work collapses many of the innovative techniques she’s developed over her career to create a hybrid approach to image making. The use of raking light on embossed photographic paper remains the foundation of her process, which is now joined by painting, collage, and intaglio printing. Her new work moves further from traditional photography, while still embracing many of its technical principles and its potent relationship to the real – formed by the medium’s articulation of detail and complicated history with evidence and truth. McKenna’s photographic reliefs are anchored by semi-abstract, figurative forms that conjure a symbolic feminine glossary of breasts, nipples, weighty curves, and wombs.

Cast in light and shadow and layered with jewel and earth tones, her handmade shapes are derived from everyday materials of casual consumption like unfolded cardboard packaging which conjure both archeological finds and mass production. She transforms these found objects into objects she’d like to find. In a time of impending collapse at the frayed ends of late-stage capitalism, these works toe the line of speculative fiction where McKenna has invented an iconography to satisfy her own needs and the imagined needs of the generations that succeed her. These images locate the female body in questions about what it is to be a woman in the past, the present, and the future. In these embodied forms, we are meant to divine something about the cosmic experience of birth and death, pain and pleasure, fragility and power, and most hopefully, a mapping towards regeneration and resilience.

Klea McKenna
Underfield, 2024 from the series Life Hack
Intaglio print. Oil-based ink on rag-paper.
41 x 118 inches (104.14 x 299.72 cm) (4 panels, each panel is 41 x 29 inches)
Edition of 3

A 5-minute studio visit with visual artist Klea McKenna while she works on an ongoing body of work called "Rainbow Bruise", which incorporates
camera less photography, printmaking and painting. Filmed during summer 2023 at In-Cahoots Artist Residency and Minnesota Street Project artist
studios in San Francisco, CA.

Klea McKenna
Tree Me, 2024 from the series Rainbow Bruise
Unique photographic relief (embossed silver gelatin photogram, fabric dye)
41 x 32 in (104.14 x 81.28 cm); frame 45 x 36 in (114.3 x 81.28 cm)

Klea McKenna
Untitled #8, 2024 from the series Life Hack
Intaglio print. Oil-based ink on rag-paper
24.50 x 21 in (62.23 x 53.34 cm); frame 27.5 x 24 in (69.85 x 60.96 cm)
Edition of 3

Klea McKenna
Supply, 2023 from the series Rainbow Bruise
Unique photographic relief (embossed silver gelatin photogram, fabric dye)
41 x 32 in (104.14 x 81.28 cm); frame 45 x 36 in (114.3 x 81.28 cm)

Klea McKenna
Tiger Lily, 2023 from the series Rainbow Bruise
Unique photographic relief (embossed silver gelatin photogram, fabric dye)
41 x 32 in (104.14 x 81.28 cm); frame 45 x 36 in (114.3 x 81.28 cm)

Klea McKenna
Girl Woman Lady, 2024 from the series Rainbow Bruise
Unique photographic relief (embossed silver gelatin photogram, fabric dye)
41 x 32 in (104.14 x 81.28 cm); frame 45 x 36 in (114.3 x 81.28 cm)

Klea McKenna
Running, 2024 from the series Rainbow Bruise
Unique photographic relief (embossed silver gelatin photogram, fabric dye)
41 x 32 in (104.14 x 81.28 cm); frame 45 x 36 in (114.3 x 81.28 cm)

Klea McKenna (b. 1980, Freestone, CA) is a visual artist who writes and makes films and is known for cameraless photography and her innovative use of light-sensitive materials. She is a 2023 recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship Award for Photography. Her work is held in several public collections, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA; United States Embassy Collection; Mead Art Museum, Amherst, MA; Museum of Fine Arts Boston, MA, and The Victoria & Albert Museum, London. She studied art at UCLA, UCSC, and California College of the Arts. Klea is the daughter of renegade ethnobotanist, Kathleen Harrison and psychedelic philosopher, Terence McKenna. She lives in San Francisco with her partner and their young children.

Portrait of Klea McKenna by Airyka Rockefeller