Kelli Vance b. 1983 — Working from staged photographs, Kelli Vance’s paintings borderline on cinematic. Vance’s style is realistic, yet there is something else that creates this dreamlike effect. This combination of technique already results in feelings of disorientation before we even look at Vance’s subject. She muffles provocative shouts existing within her compositions by depicting only portions of their narratives, keeping actions hinted by the titles relegated outside the frame. When paired with her photorealistic style, the cropping of the canvas only further eludes the viewer, as we are given a small piece of one specific moment in time.

Recently, Vance has stated that her female subjects are all reflections of herself — physically, psychologically, and emotionally. Her paintings often speak to what she herself is going through, whether they are all pictured with talismans to ward of grief or depict a number of women whom she lived with when she was younger. Vance seems to live out her life through these paintings —using her paintings to work through her personal experiences.

Vance’s luxurious and masterly paintings have often presented women in states of anomie or conflict — personal, social, physical. This is the feminine in a quietly hostile environment of her own making, or trapped in a set of expectations that she either works with, to maintain equilibrium, or against, with mixed results — sometimes defeated, sometimes defiant. Vance’s women are in a kind of unseen, unstoppable trouble, or they are recalling it, or are bracing for it. They are often in their final minutes of innocence before the sinister shadow overtakes the narrative. Vance states “I love tension, the unknown, a good cliffhanger and quiet moments that become charged the more you look into them.”

Vance often creates works where we do not see the women’s face. Vance paints the fabric of a dress, that she believes can sometimes tell more of a story than the figure. She says fingers have myriad expressions. To Vance, the tension of her subjects can be found in the twisting of hands or the tightening of the bodice, it does not have to be reflected on the female’s face. Within this all, each cropped painting seems to create a world of its own — where we question both what the woman is going through and sometimes even what she looks like. Vance gives a small sense of access into these painted worlds, that often leave us searching for answers that may not even exist.

Kelli Vance graduated from the University of Houston with her MFA in Studio Art in 2008. Her work was recently acquired by Houston Airports, city of Houston, and is in the permanent collection of the Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art, Roswell, New Mexico. Vance received an Individual Artist Grant from Houston Arts Alliance and the City of Houston and was included in the 2009 Texas Biennial. She was a finalist for the Hunting Art Prize and was a Roswell Artist-in-Residence in Roswell, New Mexico. Vance’s work has shown across Texas as well as in Los Angeles, Chicago, New Mexico, Paris, and New York. She has shown five solo exhibitions at CWFA: Myth Maker, Sappers and Miners, Performance Anxiety, We Don’t Sleep, and Don’t Abandon Me. Her work is in the collections of the Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art, Roswell, New Mexico; and the CitizenM Hotel, Austin, TX.