Kayla Plosz Antiel
July 1-31, 2016
tenderfoots
I make paintings because of my acute obsession with the stuffness of paint—its color, mutability, sensuality, and more. Color is weird. Individual colors evoke highly particular emotional responses, but color is rarely hermetic: the interaction between traffic cone orange and over-cooked pea green, for instance, engenders something neither color can achieve in isolation. Capricious play with luminescent color drives Tenderfoots. Motivated by the inexhaustible potentiality of color, these works explore and manipulate color relationships within the constructs of an impure abstraction. Impure as these paintings are pulled toward representational ideas and forms: my paintings flirt with representation but are non-committal. There are hints or intimations of images that are never fully realized or are sometimes entirely unrecognizable. My process involves a psychosomatic dialectic: I vacillate between a sort of intuitive bodily sensuality and more logically driven formal decisions. As such, Tenderfoots evolved through the free-play of color and form, taking inspiration from things as various and disparate as Moroccan and Indian textiles, contemporary children’s book illustrations, and nineteenth-century French still lifes and interiors.
Kayla Plosz Antiel was born in Saskatchewan, Canada but has lived in the United States for the past 18 years. She graduated in 2012 from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design with her MFA in visual studies. She is a painter currently living and working in Northern Virginia.
