About the work
These works present meditations/iterations of glass: a window, kitsch glass fruit, and an interior which contains both a laptop screen and a mirror. Glass functions as a protective barrier between us and the natural elements; we don’t need to worry about insects swarming around or a too-chilly breeze but are still afforded a pretty view. The window sets up and potentially frustrates the desire to come in from the elements. The feeling of longing as you pass by a lit domestic interior in the evening before the curtains are drawn. Birds smack into window glass lured by the promise of trees more glittery than the ones they’re flitting around in. Kitsch also was born out of longing: to be surrounded by a nature that makes no demands of us, is purely decorative, and that will exist in perpetuity without our care, capable of being passed down. Glass fruit, plastic palms, floral printed wallpaper, animal figurines. A nature that’s recognizable enough, just enough for us, that is cheap and attainable. A window promises a future engagement with nature if we choose it, and glass fruit is an object we can hold in our hand and be complimented on. The glass of a screen is a frustrating portal. Conjuring up at our whims all imaginable earthly images, flattened on a 2D plane, untactile, much like a painting.
-Kelsey Shwetz, 2022
About the artist
KELSEY SHWETZ approaches nature and mythology in her work through the lens of our current climate crisis and imagines a post-Anthropocene landscape. The world in her paintings is ripe with human presence but unsettlingly empty; a plausible near future where a flora and geological forms are protagonists. She describes liminal or threshold spaces, an atmosphere where an event has just occurred or is about to unfold. The structures in Shwetz’s paintings are still in mint condition, they have not weathered long spans of time. Still warm with the hum of human residue, these psychological spaces create a feeling of intense identification yet ironic distance from the environment on the canvas: a nature that is familiar but not quite right.
Kelsey Shwetz is a Canadian born painter currently living in New York. She is an MFA Visual Arts candidate (2022) at Columbia University and will be an Assistant Adjunct Professor at Columbia University in the Summer of 2022. She has been a visiting artist lecturer at UCLA, Pratt Institute, and Laguardia Community College. Shwetz is a two-time recipient of the The Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant, along with grants from Canada Council for the Arts and the Mayer Foundation. She was awarded fellowships by the Vermont Studio Center, The Choy Family, Ellen Gelmen, and CanSerrat Residency in Barcelona. She has exhibited in the United States, Canada, Slovakia, and Mexico City.
Kelsey Shwetz
