Artist Talk: Kelly Kaczynski September 30, 2010

Kaczynski’s The Stagehand’s Unseen presents a synopsis of a play in its objects and documents. situated between a collection and a tableaux with the potential to historicize the play’s origins. Handled as props in stasis, the objects of Olympus Manger are simultaneously sculpture and artifact – leaving the role of ‘artist’ latent: progenitor or activator, either/and.

Producing objects and peripheral activities (photographs, video, drawing), alongside her large scale installations, Kaczynski creates sculptural work that both carries embedded meaning and relationship to its origins while making available the transfer and reinterpretation of this meaning through the implication of an audience in handling and deploying those works. Olympus Manger uses the device of theater as its platform to examine landscape (image and function), built environment and psycho-social relationships by requiring an audience to choose between the role of ‘audience’ or ‘actor’ according to the placement of their body in relationship to the stage and their participation in the completion of the narrative. For the scenes from Olympus Manger, the audience was invited to move between audience and actor in ‘producing’ the work of art that was the play.

In The Stagehand’s Unseen, the objects take the place of the actors, laying out the materials of the play as landscape. Handling these objects as such also proposes narrative as topography, open to the wanderings of the individual. Positioned on a stage built to the perimeter of threewalls’ main gallery, the landscape of objects create desire through their stasis and limited accessibility, as the props remain just on the verge of being re-deployed yet on pause.

Kelly Kaczynski is a sculptor and installation artist. She received an MFA from Bard College, NY and BA from The Evergreen State College, WA. She has exhibited with Hyde Park Art Center, IL, Rowland Contemporary, IL, University at Buffalo Art Gallery, NY, Triple Candie, NY, Islip Art Museum, NY, Cristinerose / Josee Bienvenu Gallery, NY, DeCordova Museum, MA, Boston Center for the Arts, MA. Public installations include projects with the Main Line Art Center, Haverford, PA, the Interfaith Center, NY, Institute for Contemporary Art, Boston and the Boston National Historic Parks, MA, Boston Public Library, MA. Kaczynski currently teaches as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art Theory and Practice at Northwestern University, IL. Scene from ‘Olympus Manager’ was exhibited at the University of Buffalo Art Gallery, NY in 2006 and ‘Olympus Manger’ Scene II at Hyde Park Art Center, IL, 2008.