https://gallery30south.com/kelton-phoenix/
Kate Kelton: PHOENIX
JANUARY 2023
Seeking to elevate brave Silence Breakers who’ve come forward during the #MeToo movement, Kate Kelton’s portraiture combines their oft familiar faces with elements of her family’s Czech architecture. Her portraits are cloaked in the garb of statues that Ladislav Šaloun sculpted onto the central train station that her great- grandfather, Josef Fanta, designed for Prague between 1901 – 1909. Sampling and mixing her own lineage, Kate has transformed a historical body of work, itself a thing of lasting beauty, exchanging granite for graphite; plaster for paint.
Headdresses and crowns deify Kate Kelton’s subjects. She uplifts the Unsung Sheroes & Heroes, Patriarchy Smashers, Warrior Survivors, Silence Breakers, Philosophers, Truth-Tellers, Whistle Blowers and Thought Giants. She paints portraits cloaked in the garb of statues Ladislav Šaloun sculpted onto the train station that her great-grandfather, Josef Fanta, designed for Prague in 1901 – 1909.
Apotheosis through a reclaimed, reapplied Art Nouveau.
Kate’s recent work is a matter of expansion through contrast – she is as ephemeral as her subjects are concrete architecture; she is structural when her subjects should slip through your fingers like too-fine sand. Taken as a whole, the works in her magnificent series Phoenix are incredibly intelligent, but when looked at individually, you come to understand that these are statements of life beyond themselves. The series take embellishments of a Prague train station designed by her great-grandfather, Josef Fanta, and combines these with portraits of men and women who have stood against the sexual harassment and assault rampant in Hollywood –particularly those who have testified against Harvey Weinstein, R. Kelly, and Bill Cosby, and made allegations against Franco Zeffirelli, Donald Trump, Russell Simmons, Max Landis, Michael Jackson, Nick Carter, Luc Besson, and others. These women, like Kate herself, have suffered in the era where powerful men, every bit as immovable as the train station, wielded their power without check. The portraits emblazoned on architectural elements, they are marked against the edifice, every bit as permanent, and perhaps even more defining. If you approach those as portraits, you’re taking the moment but missing the permanence. If you take them as statuary, you’re missing the fact that they are, in fact, alive within those gazes. It’s really incredible how much a shift of the light, a dart of the eye, can turn each of them from a memorial into a promise.
This is not an exhibition about tragedy. This is a monument to courage, survival and empowerment.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Kate Kelton was born in the south of Germany, after her parents escaped Czechoslovakia. Her early years were spent in a VW bus traveling Europe with her mother, an abstract painter. Settling in Toronto, Canada at age seven, Kelton attended the Etobicoke School of the Arts as a Visual Arts Major, and received a Bachelor of Applied Arts in Film, from Ryerson University. Her father was an architect. His grandfather, and namesake, was Josef Fanta: renowned Art Nouveau architect, engineer and sculptor, who worked closely with Alphonse Mucha. Photographer Dagmar Hochová is Kelton’s great aunt, on her mother’s side. Kelton also had a recurring role on Stephen King’s Haven on the Syfy Channel. When the illustrated re- edition of the book it’s based on, The Colorado Kid, was published, she illustrated the front and back inside covers. Her first lead role on tv was opposite Eric Roberts and Eddie Izzard, in the Independent Film Channel’s Bullet In The Face. Alex Maleev illustrated her for the poster. Her first feature film, Deepa Mehta’s The Republic of Love, debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival. Her film credits include cult classics, Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle and American Psycho II. Did you also spot her in music videos, like Shaggy’s “It Wasn’t Me?” Almost as good as googling her as “the Tic Tac girl.” ;} Kate has exhibited her artwork internationally for decades, at, among others: the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles, the New Walk Museum & Art Gallery in the UK; Gallery 1988 in New York, Venice, and West Hollywood; Gabba Gallery, La Luz de Jesus Gallery, and Durden & Ray in Los Angeles; Art On Scene in Beverly Hills; Galerie F in Chicago; Lawless Concept in Montreal; and The Sony Centre for the Performing Arts in Toronto. Her work has toured with Yoko Ono’s Group Show Arising from Zurich, to Portugal, to the UK and Germany.
“CASEHENGE” Bullet Casings, Acrylics on Wood. 12" x 12" x 3"Manhattanhenge… Bullethenge… Casinghenge… CASEhenge. I wonder how many cases Manhattan had at the beginning of the pandemic vs now. No-one else remembers the improvised off-shore morgues? If the Left is now co-opting the Right’s Anti-Mask stance, are y'all pro-gun now too? Guns have more rights than the disabled or women, just like Covid now apparently… This piece could have easily taken 400-500 lives, the number of people dying here weekly of Covid. Look, what if I’m wrong? What if 500 people aren’t dying here daily of a brand new disease never before encountered on planet earth? What if it’s just HALF that? This crowned could’ve killed 250 people, and if a shooter got that many in one go? We WOULD have gun reform overnight in the US. But when it’s the disabled community begging the world to listen, who do you think has purer motives? “Experts” who need the show to go on? “Experts” are calling a ‘vascular’ disease ‘respiratory,’ in an effort to minimize. If I am wrong? At least I won’t contribute to anyone’s death or disability. Can you say the same? How many times do you think you’ve passed on asymptomatic Covid? How many times do you think it’s killed the host if they were living with chromic illness like I do?
