Kelsey Boncato

Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA

Artist statement

Flowing from my line of disempowered visionaries —femmes who were betrayed, silenced, and hijacked by destructive colonialism— my practice is informed by my ancestral inheritance of clairvoyance and clairsentience as I transmute dream messages from the subterranean into material form. I study the complexities of memory, emotion, and the relationship of others through my on-going dream documentation, investigating the control on what seeps out and what bleeds in. Building my psychic lexicon, I’ve developed my interdisciplinary practice as a devotional commitment around body, water, and dreamwork as ritual. Exploring the melodious undulation of oil painting, my process starts from below with a red-pink layer as a warm tone —symbolic of blood, a trace shared with the Philippine T’boli dreamweavers’ palette. I softly blend together, caressing and gliding the oil and its pigment, translating details slowly and rhythmically. I summon clarity to the mystique and transcendental imagery that wails to be seen and felt. I integrate instrumental technologies through the trace of bodily gesture, editing, and projecting video. This stirs my traditional practice with its expansiveness, orchestrating time and space, as I further augment the sensible realm. Altogether, my new works support my embodied research and practice on subconscious synchronicities that question the containment of energy and the rupture of suppressive control —offering release, intuitiveness, and an openness from...

Artwork