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Eight sculptures comprise Kelsey Harrison’s debut solo exhibition, each work a morphed self-portrait, each portrait an investigation of material possibilities including combinations of foam, steel rods, plaster casts, wax casts, latex, liquid nails, stuffed with sentimental old clothing and the artist’s studio work gloves. The result is a sustained object lesson in self-awareness, a timely and welcome twist on the contemporary figure, alternately generous and self-effacing, yet always pure, familiar and human.

According to Harrison “I love work that embodies queer experience as unapologetic exuberance, sensuality, and joy, but this body of work is instead queer in a stern and vulnerable tenor. This is the first show of figurative work I’ve made, and my first show that explicitly addresses queerness and gender non-conformity. I think it manifests an attitude of queerness that I don’t feel I see often in contemporary work about queer experience. Vulnerably, fearfully, defiantly and confidently all at once, and all the time is the way I occupy my gender. When I encounter discomfort from others around my gender, as I and many others do often, my response is the same as the attitude in the works in this show: to hold my right to space, but feel the sadness, strain, and exhaustion of another confirmation that I need to expect friction in my body as I occupy it. The show is also somewhat sculpturally circular: the liquid nails used to affix the foam in the full-size figures is embedded in the claw footed sculpture. The latex negative of the wall hung bust is taken directly from the oil clay positive. The horizontal figure wears the welding gloves I wore in making its armature. The standing figure wears the work gloves I used in fabricating the wax sculptures. The burlap in the breasts of the standing figure was recycled from the alginate mold of my face.”

Kelsey Harrison’s sculptural work has been shown in institutions nationally including The Jewish Museum, Abrons Art Center, and The Knockdown Center in New York, SOMArts in San Francisco, The Sullivan Galleries in Chicago, The College of William and Mary in Virginia, and the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art and the Utah Museum of Fine Art in Salt Lake City. Harrison (b. 1989 in Northern California) received her BFA in Sculpture from Purchase College, State University of New York and her MFA in Sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She lives and works in Memphis, Tennessee where she is Assistant Professor in Sculpture at the University of Memphis.

The show run through August 3, 2021. The gallery is open by appointment and open hours may be listed on Instagram.