Kelli Vance

Another Gallery LA is pleased to present Fever Dream by Kelli Vance.

Working from staged photographs, Kelli Vance’s paintings borderline on cinematic. Using costumes, wigs and other props, she creates depictions of intimate moments where women are in states of ambiguous yet pointed tension. Fever Dream refers to a disjointed or strange experience that engenders an even greater sense of oddness when considered retrospectively. These works explore the minutiae of a gesture that can lead interpretation down a dark alley, leaving us with more questions than answers.

Vance’s paintings have often presented women in states of anomie or conflict—personal, social, physical. This is the feminine in a quietly hostile environment of her own making or trapped in a set of expectations that she either works with, to maintain equilibrium, or against, with mixed results—sometimes defeated, sometimes defiant. They are in a kind of unseen, unstoppable trouble, or they are recalling it, or are bracing for it. In ‘What Is Held Too Tightly’, the figure grasps her fur coat with bejeweled fingers, asking us to ponder her circumstances, status and emotion. ‘Soft Around the Edges’ is coyer and titillating. The bite mark on her hand, serpent ring on her pinky and her fiery red curls wrapped around her finger, all lead to perhaps a kinky narrative that has something sinister under the surface. What has taken place within these stories, and our own stories, that allows us to identify or empathize with these characters? As viewers, we shift back and forth between states of admiration of the subjects’ elegance and seductiveness—these women are in control, waiting for the arrival of something sublime, or pedestrian, or terrifying—and apprehension concerning their imminent fates.

Kelli Vance graduated from the University of Houston with her MFA in 2008. Her work was recently acquired by Houston Airports in 2021 and is in the permanent collection of the Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art. Roswell, New Mexico. Vance’s work has shown across Texas as well as in Los Angeles, Chicago, and New Mexico. Fever Dream is her first exhibition with Another Gallery.