Please join us for the opening of Plugging Up The Cloud, new work on paper by Portland artist and art educator Kelly McConnell, on July 27, 2018, from 5-8pm during the Biddeford+Saco ArtWalk. The work will be on display through August 25, 2018.
McConnell says, “My paintings are about time, a systematic record of time, and representations of my life through an allegorical selection of colors. For example, red to me stands for plasma or life. My paintings are realistic in their expression in that they are about me. Rather than a narrative, I have painted a set of emotional symbols and a collection of paths and journeys. Reflected in the paint, I see through fog, sheets of water, or a veil, depicted with multiple layers of color. These layers are how I experience my life. The accumulation of marks become the painting. The painting is a physical artifact of an experience, one woven with the past, the event of the painting, and the future of the object I created.”
“What is happening in our nation, and my disgust with our current government officials, are at odds with the serene systems I have been embracing in my studio. I have found I am less able to compartmentalize the world around me to make sense of it. Recently, hands, heads, and other figurative elements have emerged in my mark-making, and I have let them stay. I have teased these images off the canvas surface and rearranged them in the environment. In this life, when we now all work and try to make meaning, these paintings, then, also represent my own disequilibrium as an artist in this time.”
Kelly McConnell is the Director of Art Education Outreach, Associate Professor at Maine College of Art and has lived and worked in the Portland area since 1995. She holds a BA from Gettysburg College, MFA from Maryland Institute, College of Art, a PK-12 Art Education Certificate, as well as a certificate in Advanced Educational Leadership from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Kelly’s recent solo exhibits have been at Three Fish Gallery and Mayo Street Arts in Portland. Plugging Up The Cloud at Engine in Biddeford will be followed by another solo exhibit at Frank Brockman Gallery in Brunswick, November 2019.