“Preservation Society”
Kelly K. Wright
Opens: November 3rd, 6 – 9 PM
On view: Saturdays & Sundays, 2 – 6 PM through November 26th
Kelly K. Wright received her BFA in Photography and MFA in Visual Art from Washington University in St. Louis. Her photographic series explore the relationship between longing, melancholia, representation and identity, often playing out in fragmentary vignettes. The space of the home features prominently in her work, functioning as a kind of psychological space in which the viewer is subjected to an ever-elusive sense of familiarity, intimacy and notions of the ideal.
Her most recent series, “Preservation Society”, critically examines house museums and period rooms, sites where home moves beyond idea or concept, becoming a kind of simulated experience. The images use the currency of these spaces — beauty, opulence, claims of historic authority, the voyeuristic allure of entering private spaces of the departed elite — to draw the viewer in. However, upon closer examination, the images reveal and, as photographs, document, the failure of an imaginary world precariously balanced on a veneer of intense control and order. These failures take the form of the artificial, contrived, empty, aloof, and sometimes crude — subtle, yet ominous ruptures that lay bare the ways in which these sites’ desire for authority over time and memory are inherent to their very design. They create a tension between beauty and ugliness, truth and fiction, nostalgia and disillusionment; an antidote to escapism and omission under the guise of history, and creating space for contemplation around the attraction of these sites and spaces like them, and what they actually preserve.
web | kellykwright.com
insta | @kellykwright.studio
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