In Tired Illusions, Katelyn Ledford’s still life subjects trek the globe for authenticity and truthfulness in the 21st Century.
Athens, 7 October 2024 — Dio Horia gallery is excited to announce Katelyn Ledford’s solo exhibition Tired Illusions in Athens. The exhibition Tired Illusions includes paintings and three-dimensional works from the artist’s series that explore the constantly shifting complexities of interpersonal relationships. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition in Greece and the culmination of her three-week long residency at Dio Horia in September 2024. The exhibition opens on October 16 at 19:00, in the presence of the artist.
Since 2020, American artist Katelyn Ledford has worked on a series of allegorical portraits that use trompe-l’oeil and photorealism to address the performative aspect of social exchanges within the art world. She conveys these entanglements through the lens of a woman and visual artist. Specifically, Ledford aims to address authenticity and truthfulness between herself and her viewer and uses various art historical tropes towards this goal. Though not directly political, Ledford’s work is also a reaction to the current political and economic climate around the world.
Ledford’s technique deconstructs the concept of art historical portraiture by allowing objects, and not figures, to tell the narrative of the subject. She starts by collecting symbolically charged objects in her studio and either staging them as still lifes or using them herself as performance props. It’s an intimate process of exploring the objects and symbols that are significant to the subject of the painting. The process is a kind of mysticism as she unearths the hidden meanings of these objects and collages them to create a portrait that tells the subject’s unique story. These elements take form in a range from the reverse of the painting object, to ambiguous female faces, to various cheap tapes. She desires for these intricate still-lifes to catch the viewer’s attention and make them experience the final works as conceptual and formal elements that describe the subjects’ and the viewer’s agencies. Ledford’s practice is commenting on the universal artistic experiences of genre, trauma, hope, and celebration while depicting the society of spectacle that often connects them.
In Katelyn Ledford’s exhibition Tired Illusions, clowns, gloves, candles, bubble wrap and text stand as mementos of drama that invite the viewer in to revel and analyze along with her. The choice of an earth toned color palette and the depiction of only the reverse of historical paintings (alas the hidden part of the canvas) opens a door to her audience to experience a secret dimension of the art world that is more honest. The good thing is, that the artist provides multiple sources of light within the artworks as tools to look closely, so that all may experience the true sentiments underneath the various tired illusions.
