NEW YORK, NY.- Chapter NY announces Eyelids Are our Thinnest Skin, Ann Greene Kelly’s second solo exhibition at the gallery. The exhibition will feature a selection of recent drawings accompanied by two floor-based sculptures. With greater emphasis on Kelly’s works on paper, this presentation will highlight this significant element of the artist’s practice and its relationship to her sculptural forms.
Kelly engages materials and subjects sourced from her immediate surroundings. Her drawings offer glimpses into an expanding illusory realm comprised of forms that attract and inspire her. Within her compositions, tunnels, drains, doorways, and grates provide passageways into spaces beyond the structures that contain them. Kelly describes her drawings as diaristic, places for unfiltered thoughts—serving as a type of visual interrogation and a method by which to filter through her imagination. Her attention to minute detail and intricate patterning precludes a labor-intensive practice that fuels a sloweddown process of visualization.
As the exhibition title suggests, our eyelids serve as a delicate optic boundary and passageway between our internal selves and the spaces that we occupy. Kelly’s work navigates this metaphoric threshold, building upon her distinctive visual lexicon to illuminate the peculiar intermingling of the body and built environment. In her two most recent sculptures, she embeds plastered forms into gutted car doors, delving into the space that divides the interior and exterior of the vehicle. Like her drawings, Kelly sculptures are characterized by a complex entanglement of layered forms that build away from a specified surface or picture plane. Viewed from above, deep crevices and implied passageways draw viewers beyond Kelly’s linear arrangements into the depths of an unspecified imaginary.
Ann Greene Kelly lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. She received her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art, MD in 2010. She has participated in group shows at White Flag Projects, St. Louis; David Zwirner, New York; and Stems Gallery, Brussels. In 2015, she opened her first solo exhibition at White Columns, New York. She has an upcoming solo exhibition at Chapter NY and will been included in an upcoming group exhibition at Galleria ZERO in Milan.
