Emily Kaelin
Emily Kaelin is a recent graduate of Rocky Mountain College of Art and Design with a BFA in painting. Her work ranges from painting and drawing to installation and video, often incorporating both traditional and unconventional explorations of materials and techniques. Thematically, her work draws on heavily personal, autobiographical experiences and explores them in the context of universal human experience. The work tends to relate most explicitly to the body, primarily in terms of what happens to an individual human, both physically and emotionally. Because of the profundity of these experiences, she desires to produce a highly emotional reaction from her viewers. Often this is achieved by utilizing materials and imagery that are highly suggestive, disturbing, provocative, uncomfortable, even downright ugly. Usually these more negative aspects of the work are coupled with suggestions of beauty, comfort, and appeal, sometimes to juxtapose the two, but more frequently to blur the line between perceived opposites or reveal the fragility of the line that separates them. Beauty and ugliness are often mixed up together in real life, and the distinctions between the two can be unclear, so her work tries to reveal how sometimes beauty can lie in the very ugliness or unsettling qualities of thing, idea, or experience.
