PHILADELPHIA, PA.-The Philadelphia Society for the Preservation of Landmarks is pleased to present an exhibition at the Powel House Museum by internationally-acclaimed artist Karen Kilimnik. The exhibition will run from June 26 till August 12, with a free, public opening reception on June 26th, from 6-8pm. The latest in the Landmarks Contemporary Projects series, this installation by Philadelphia-native Kilimnik has been timed to coincide with the artist's current retrospective at the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art (on view till August 5th).

The Powel House Museum-the Georgian home of Samuel Powel, the mayor of Philadelphia just before and after the American Revolution-has been a familiar site to Kilimnik while growing up in Philadelphia. As one of the centers of the political and social life in Colonial and Revolutionary Philadelphia, the Powel House is an ideal location for Kilimnik's ongoing interrogation of history. In its reconstructed and reinterpreted tourist-attraction state, the house is also a fertile ground for Kilimnik to continue exploring the magic potential of an artwork's environment.

Kilimnik's project at the Powel House will be her first major intervention in a historic space in the United States, and it is fitting that it should take place in her home-city. The project will consist of subtle additions of sound works, paintings and sculptural elements that draw from sources as varied as 18th-century painting, stories by Charles Dickens, The Scarlet Pimpernel and The Avengers television series. For viewers, Kilimnik's piece will be at once familiar and discordant: recognizable cues from popular culture will reveal the impossibility of objective interpretation. Her poetic and subjective explorations -- such as placing picturesque tufts of artificial snow on certain interior windows of the Powel House, or showing photographs of Philadelphia streets that give a Dickensian era feeling - provide a new way to connect the contemporary mind to the past.

Karen Kilimnik currently has a mid-career retrospective on view at the ICA in Philadelphia that will travel to the MCA Chicago, and Aspen Museum of Art. A Catalog is forthcoming. In the past year, Kilimink has had solo museum shows, at the ARC Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Serpentine Gallery, London; and Le Consortium, in Dijon, France. In conjunction with these European exhibitions, JP RIngier published the first monograph of Karen Kilimnik's work. In 2005, Kilimnik had one person exhibition at the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa,Venice, Italy, and did a special exhibition of her work within the Haus zum Kirschgarten, at the Historisches Museum Basel, Switzerland. Karen Kilimnik is represented by 303 Gallery, New York.