art
art
Karey Kessler creates map-paintings that explore the entangled ways in which our minds, time, and place are deeply interconnected. Her paintings are about her grief and distress about vanishing wilderness and at the same time they tell stories of personal memories, deep geologic time, and infiniteness. With ink and watercolor, Kessler create a network of dots, lines and color. Those marks and colors evoke feelings, thoughts, and memories that she labels. The "places" don't exist in the real world. Dots can be things such as stars, rocks, or memories; lines can be possible roads, rivers, or the passage of time; pools of color can suggest clouds or lakes or a mysterious presence. The resulting maps create a bridge between her internal landscapes and physical locations. They play on the fact that the Hebrew word for 'the Place,' ha-Makom, is also used as a name for God.
Kessler (b. 1974) earned a BA in Fine Arts and Anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania and her MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Her work is in the flat files of the Pierogi Gallery (NYC) and is included in the online registry of White Columns Gallery (NYC). Her work is published in the books: The Map as Art (Princeton Architectural Press, 2009), by Kitty Harmon and From Here to There: A Curious Collection From the Hand Drawn Map Association (Princeton Architectural Press, 2010) and The Embodied Forest (ecoartspace, 2021). In 2022 Meta Open Arts commissioned her to create a mural at the Star Fire Reality Labs in Redmond, WA. And in 2019 she participated in the SciArt Initiative Bridge Residency. She has created temporary artworks such as, A Path of Wonderment and Connection, along the Rainier Valley Greenway in Seattle,WA and an installation on the Tacoma Tollbooth Gallery in Tacoma, WA. She currently lives in Seattle and is a member of Shift Gallery.
