Kenzie Wells

STORM - Purple nebulous oil painting on canvas - Extra-terrestrial

2018

Kenzie Wells has attended residencies at the Wassaic Project Artist Residency in New York, Oxbow School of Art and Artists’ Residency in Michigan, and Penland School of Craft in North Carolina, and has exhibited nationally in Tennessee, Arizona, Michigan, Indiana, California, and New York. Wells is a co-founder and member of SYZYGY, an artist collective with Katie Hubbell and Danni O’Brien. Recent exhibitions include “Alptraum (Nightmare),” Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, CA, and “Super Ultra and the Soft Between”, a three person collaborative installation created with SYZYGY as part of SPRING/BREAK Art Show in New York, NY. Originally from Knoxville, TN, Wells received their BFA in 2015 from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and MFA from the University of Arizona in Tucson, where they currently live and work. I create objects that exist in the liminal spaces between painting, sculpture, and installation. An environment of surfaces that are seemingly flat yet perplexingly dimensional, my work explores the mythologies and illusions embedded in structure and perception. The geology of urban landscapes becomes a formal scene of deception in my materialized storyworld, navigated through the lens of a queer person who is certain they are from a different dimension. Sensory information and found materials gathered from walking though urban scenes become an orchestrated narrative of warped forms and surfaces within constructed, immersive spaces. Through a disarray of familiar objects and spatial arrangements, this queered perception of structure takes on the logic of a dream by defying commonplace expectations, resembling a contorted mirror-world of our structured reality. Paralleling the immediate constraints of the physical with the limitless ambience of the psyche, my work merges the dark, delusional distortions of our perception with the physical arena we reside in.