Klea McKenna

Lives and works in San Francisco, CA, USA

Artist statement

In Rainbow Bruise I collapse several techniques I’ve developed over the last decade to create a hybrid approach to image-making at the intersection of photography, printmaking and painting. I misuse my medium by embossing photographic paper in an etching press then I cast raking light across its uneven surface. These works are then layered with painting and intaglio printing. While this work moves further from traditional photography, it still embraces its potent relationship to the real – formed by the medium’s complicated history with detail and truth. I use these methods to depict semi-abstract, figurative beings with a confounding blend of concrete evidence and speculative fantasy. They are composed of a vocabulary of symbolic feminine forms: breasts, weighty curves and wombs; shapes that are derived from everyday materials like consumer packaging and unfolded cardboard boxes which creates an aesthetic that blends archeological artifacts with the die-cut curves of mass production.

Artwork