"My art walks a fine line between figuration and abstraction, centering on the body as the expression of identity/who and where I am in the world. I make collage-paintings using objects and images from my immediate surroundings that often seem at first to be insignificant but are too important to throw away, and, in a real way, describe the poignant actuality of everyday life—scraps of paper that I have collected, old drawings, and fragments of photographs. I combine these objects and images in two ways: editing digital images of some of them and printing those compositions on canvas; and attaching others directly to the canvas using thread or adhesive. Lines of thread, ink, and paint on the surface exaggerate the composition and create land or body masses that the viewer can imagine occupying. Parts of each painting are recognizable and parts are masked so that the resulting collaged image looks more map-like than figure-like. In these works, I explore the same method of selective and piecemeal self-definition facilitated by social media and the same obfuscation of the female body that we see in the images all around us, and I grapple with the balance between the desire to be noticed and the desire for privacy. One's own identity is always relative to other factors and histories. The works I create ask the viewer to decide how much of the image is real and how much it even matters; ultimately, we all decide for ourselves where our truth resides." -- Katherine Keltner
