Artist Statement

Stacee Kalmanovsky's work is rooted in the uncanny, suggestive, and picturesque. Her urge to invent and exaggerate is tempered by a deep dedication to the medium at hand. She believes in the conceptual process itself, from gathering information and sorting through, manipulating, and qualifying the image, to the indisposable skill to achieve the end result. Like in the alchemic process, the raw matter (sulfur = visual information) is transformed, refined, and persuaded into its purest form (gold = art).

In her recent work, the artist is inspired by Karen Kilimnik's easy transition from installation to drawing and painting, Elizabeth Peyton's vivid and romantic representations, and Chicago photographer Melanie Schiff's inclusion and exclusion of the figure. Stacee Kalmanovsky chooses excerpts of 90’s rock culture to communicate the sublime with ease and facility. As Guns 'N' Roses and Nirvana videos are displaced by time and separated from the music, the painted video stills gain independence. The appropriated images double as still life (Wine Spill), allegory (Cheerleader and Bride Running), and even abstraction (Swinging), while the poignancy and euphoria of the music video remains. This dramatic, gothic poignancy shows itself in other recent work. In Be Careful What you Wish For as well as Untitled (Death and the Maiden), the images are puzzling and alluring.  Violence is sited, both physical and emotional, but in a way that is uncanny and sexy.

The uncanny sensibility is also key in the 3D work of the artist. The installation becomes a stage waiting for the active observer, functioning both theatrically and architecturally. Outside of the frame and pedestal, the installation is an invitation to enter into a suspension of belief, a space invented for the mind, but one that exists within the environment. The privilege of this medium is its conceptual and material capacity to function under a certain notion of practical magic. Paint pools on the floor in lakes and abstract puddles; paper, an exquisite construction material, easily becomes a screen, a cave, a mobile, a sculpture, and yet never loses its lightness, blankness, and purity. By creating symbols of the actions or events that she wants to occur in the world, Stacee Kalmanovsky builds `shrines´ to the sublime. As in RAIN (installation, 2005), the intricate construction of fishing line and beading is lucid and vivid both in concept and form. Rain, with its visual opulence, is intended to enchant and improve. 

Most importantly the artist is actively working out a visual system of her own. It is with great ambition and dedication that all work proceeds.

© 2009 Stacee Kalmanovsky | All Rights Reserved.