Opaque Collective presents RE-HASH, an exhibition of new, site-specific work by Kellen Wright and Mad Green exploring estrangement, displacement, and the persistent revisiting of memory.
Rooted in Mad Green’s experiences growing up in Carondelet, their new multimedia work considers the continuous retracing of memory as it becomes entangled with emotion and place, and the ways these processes shift, morph, and elide over time. Kellen Wright’s drawings, created directly on the gallery walls, weave throughout the exhibition, complicating the understanding of urban and rural, locating herself in relation to Green.
By virtue of its geography, Carondelet is a neighborhood defined by estrangement, its borders and relationship to the city marked by the divide of Highway 55. The gallery of Opaque becomes a physical site for exploring these forces, where the separation gives way to equal parts isolation and freedom. Here, industry and nature collide, each reckoning for the prominence of their position. Meanwhile, time moves with the river, carrying and preserving the past, even as its currents shape and reshape the present moment.
Exhibition statement
In RE-HASH, Kellen Wright’s landscape drawings span the height of the gallery walls; a matrix in which Mad Green’s memories of Carondelet are inlaid. The enmeshment of these two distinct practices forms a new environment, one that holds two unique perspectives both deeply rooted in Missouri.
Here, the cadence of life is born of the river, carrying traces of the past while its currents continually renew the present. Industry and nature collide, each reckoning for the prominence of their position on the banks.
Charcoal carries time. Made in a paint-bucket-turned-kiln, Wright transforms foraged honeysuckle, an invasive plant, into an industrial material for remembering. Her drawings scale the entirety of the space, occupying large swathes or peeking out from corners, catching light. Moments of clarity, like the face of a deer, recede into the obfuscation of marks and movement.The physical process of applying and erasing material within the space mirrors the attention to detail that accompanies the act of recognition.
Green’s works punctuate the walls, cerebral darts that collapse veracity with authenticity. An act of navigation in the face of estrangement, each work is a self-portrait constructed by memory and as malleable as the medium. Green challenges their own recollection through embodied movement, working with both hands to trace biographical surroundings through narrative. As a child growing up in the same neighborhood where these works are presented, they confront the forces of place and time that constantly redefine the contours of their life.
The space becomes a site of recognition, where both artists toy with legibility in the haze of memory. What is seen, what is obscured, what is owned, what is owed. In an autobiography, what is kept?
Memory is not fixed but continually constructed.
Marina May Schleicher & Sophia Hatzikos
Artist Statements:
Kellen Wright
I live and work south of the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi River. I use my transexuality as a lens to understand Midwestern subjectivity–ecologies, infrastructures, and geographies that shape the site of our relation. Embodied activities like walking and conversation inform writing, drawing, annotating, transcribing, rubbing, photographing, and foraging. This body of research takes urban green space, manicured or neglected, and infrastructure as subject matter, tracing the affect of our landscapes into installations and videos. I keep faith that making work through seemingly isolated(ing) lived experience can be praxis for relation. We deserve useful vocabularies; we create useful vocabularies.
Instagram: @kellen_w
Mad Green
I make art about myself. As a person raised in a world of violence, wrought with lies and misinformation, I tangle with how these traits have been (dis)inherited as I’ve come into my own identity. Based in storytelling, my work collapses the space between visual and written language. Words ebb and flow from behind walls of imagery, left handed writing prompts become sporadic topography, memories are layered until they are no longer coherent.
I work at the border of disciplines utilizing drawing, painting, printmaking, video, performance, writing and social practice to investigate my own narrative. Everything is a self portrait; the drawings of myself as a child, the outlines of my grandmother’s home, the buildings that shaped the landscape of my life, the words that give shape to images that are too out of focus to be legible. Through each specific medium, my work provides meaning to the aspects of my life that are otherwise enigmatic.
I am always navigating estrangement – from people, places, versions of myself. This alienation only increases an urge for connection, to find similarities in others. With this, my work questions the idea of trauma dumping, where the line between emoting and connecting blurs into oversharing and emotional labor. How far am I allowed to go before my release is returned with pity or discomfort? Why am I so uncomfortable knowing and being known at my deepest?
Instagram: @madgreen.art
Website: https://www.madkoestergreen.com/
Mad Green – Work List
262, charcoal, shellac, and acrylic on mdf, birch frame made by artist, 48”x 29 ⅝”
Gathering Sites, diptych acrylic, ink and graphite on mat board, birch frames made by artist, 4.5” x 6.5” x2
Skinny Jeans, house paint, acrylic, charcoal, pastel, and India ink on fabric, 47 ¼” x 47 ¼”
She Liked Me, house paint, acrylic, India ink and paintbrush cleaner on canvas, 35” x 26”