Ferris Sulfate
January 7th, 2011I trudged through the snow today to see Keltie Ferris’ show, KF + CM 4EVER, at Horton Gallery. Luckily for me, the gallery has extended the show till Saturday! So worth the wet socks.
Keltie Ferris at Horton Gallery
Keltie’s images struggle against their origins. Keltie’s titles dodge pronunciation. You wanna fight, man?
In appearance, each painting looks like a disheveled network of phosphorescent bursts beneath leveling blankets of opaque mash. Parallel streams of vividly colored dots engender mosaic periodicity, both as punctuation and as pattern. These layers of crawling lines could act as unifying fabrics, or else as the intrusions of the distracting surroundings, which taunt all New Yorkers without mercy – Broadway Boogie-Woogie. Or maybe they are Keltie’s nod to infinity. Roberta Smith writes, “Sometimes the space tilts inward, which creates the effect of seeing expanses of city lights through low-lying clouds; sometimes the surface expands forward in neon fluorescent froths, a little like fireworks.” Whatever the illusion, a lucid vision of stratified depth persists.
Keltie Ferris, "<<<>>>," 2010
The mirages can’t escape their creator, however. The handmade, wrought facture of these paintings turns the fireworks into spurts of Krylon, the blankets into scrapes from a palette knife, and the parallel tracks into drawing with a jittery hand. Emphasis shifts to the transitive verb you might use to describe Keltie’s action against the canvas.
Box and weave: Keltie Ferris, "xoxo," 2010
So viewing these uninhibited, ostentatious, freewheeling puts a viewer into a see-saw of alternating views: one of the pictorial image, which he or she associates with the natural world of nouns; the other of the craft-based creation, which he or she describes with action verbs.
Keltie Ferris, "ooooOOO()()()," 2010 via my camera's Auto Mode (l) then Fireworks Mode (r)