Grace Kennison

For What

2023

"I am an artist and painter exploring female-centric visions and stories of violence, resistance, and tribulation inspired by women’s complicated history in the American West. Growing up in the foothills of Northern Colorado, the bed of the Rocky Mountains near Fort Collins encouraged a strong relationship between the natural landscape and myself which heavily defied the alienating feelings in relation to ongoing urbanization of the Colorado Piedmont and a burgeoning suburban landscape. My work supposes land as a natural phenomenon is fundamental to construction of identity, memory, and spirituality as humans. Pulling from a long history of romanticization of western life and land in popular culture and art, my artwork fabulates intersecting narratives and fantasies of white women engaged in embittered relationships with themselves, nature, animal companions, other women, and god. Often reflective of personal explorations of violence and whiteness in the context of a post-colonial and late-capitalistic western world, my work can often be read as lamentations of failed symbiosis and troubled links to the natural world or my own identity in honoring and harmonizing with land that we make home." - Grace Kennison