Meet the Artists Series featuring Klea McKenna
Thursday, September 24 | 5-6pm PDT via ZOOM
FREE for Los Gatos Residents & NUMU members, join today!

Real Artists. Virtual Studio Visits. A NU Series!

Underground (1), 2019, Photographic relief, unique gelatin silver photogram. Copper, sepia and selenium toned impression of an Uzbekistani handmade fringe, circa 1920s, Courtesy of the artist and EUQINOM Gallery

In this NU 4-part series, curator Allison Railo takes us into the homes and studios of the artists featured in the alternative process photography exhibition, Image + Object. It virtually doesn’t get any better than this!

Meet photographer Klea McKenna as she takes us on a virtual tour of her studio. Learn more about her artistic process and interest in the varied traditions of women’s needlework and handmade fabrics that are featured in her textured photograms.

Using both natural and man-made surfaces, McKenna records a physical imprint that she calls a photographic rubbing onto gelatin silver paper which is then exposed as a photogram — a photographic image made without a camera. By pressing the paper into the circular forms of sections of felled trees or embossing the paper with textures of hand-made fabrics, McKenna creates an object that is more than a photograph. The physical pressure transforms the paper into a sculptural relief, texturized and molded to the object which also becomes visible through light exposure and darkroom chemical processes.

Klea McKenna received her BA from University of California Santa Cruz and her MFA from California College of the Arts, San Francisco. She is based in San Francisco and her work is included in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the US Embassy collection, the Mead Museum of Art, Amherst, MA, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

This program has been made possible in part by a grant from the Silicon Valley Community Foundation.