NEW YORK, NY.- Mitchell-Innes & Nash presents its second solo exhibition of work by Brooklyn-based artist Keltie Ferris. The exhibition will include approximately a dozen new paintings made during a recent stay in Los Angeles, California as well as a number of the artist’s body prints—Ferris’s ongoing series of unique works on paper. This will be the first time Ferris’s paintings and body prints will be exhibited together. The exhibition will be on view at the gallery from September 10 through October 17, 2015.
The new body of work features Ferris’s expanding investigation into painting as a multiplanar site for constructed light and shifting space. Akin to her earlier layered compositions, these new works are built from discrete, integral marks that solidify and dissolve between mass and landscape. Expanding her range of mark making in scale shifts and close ups, Ferris couples syncopated brushstrokes with airbrushed oil paint to create surfaces that combine the topography of textiles with the banter of gestural mark making.
In her body prints Ferris explores painting as a personal index. Using natural oils, pigments, and her whole body like a brush, Ferris presses herself onto the paper. Through minimal materials and the ambiguous impressions of her imprint, Ferris literalizes and reifies the relationship of an artists’ identity to the work that she or he produces. Together the new paintings and body prints ask how the artist might be conveyed in the presence of a single mark – a smear, a press, a drag, a spray – and whether collectively these marks can be experienced as a fixed space or single body.
Keltie Ferris lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She received her MFA in 2006 from Yale School of Art and her BFA in 2004 from Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD). Recent solo exhibitions include Keltie Ferris: Doomsday Boogie at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, and Body Prints at Chapter NY, New York. Her works have been included in group exhibitions at institutions such as Contemporary Arts Museum of Houston, Texas; Brooklyn Museum, New York; and Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, Indianapolis. She was recently awarded the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award in Painting by the Academy of Arts and Letters, where her work was included in their 2014 Annual Invitational Exhibition of Visual Arts. She has an upcoming solo exhibition at the University Art Museum at the University of Albany, NY opening in February 2016.
