“Surviving Surviving”

Anne Kantor Kellett

Solo Exhibition 

National Academy Museum

 

The world of Anne Kantor Kellett is a terra incognita of simultaneous memories, subconscious motivations, and metaphysical projections.

 

In this large and mysterious universe, we sometimes encounter questions without answers, where the ambiguity between life and death unifies the two sides, leaving us in a state of displacement.  Like Dante in his Divine Comedy, we must rely on symbols and paradigms. 

 

About her art, Anne says: ”My work deals with this ambiguity.  As a child of holocaust survivors, my art has been a safe place to escape and give physical expression to complex feelings of what is known and unknown.  I search for a sensibility, which highlights the vulnerability of being, which we all possess.”

 

When our memories are tumultuous or unbearable, we look for a refuge.  Our minds naturally turn to our home, to our loved ones, or, as here, to our individual identity and our creativity.

 

Still, ambiguity rules.  We could talk about the profound silence of a sound and the profound sound of silence, about the unity that lives in multiplicity – all part of the continuous cycle of in which there is no life without death, no darkness without light.

 

In this exhibition of Anne’s work, in honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day and Rwandan Genocide Remembrance Month, we find sculptures of distorted faces, ethereal paintings, drawings of a humanity that appears and disappears under the traces of the texture.

 

Her photographs of Rwanda have a marked documentary approach, but a thread connects these works with the more mysterious sculptures and drawings.  The photographs inhabit a place, while the sculptures and drawings are nowhere and everywhere.  There is no suffering, no pain.  Yet we come to understand that these images are part of a whole, forever teetering between vulnerability and safety.

 

“Surviving Surviving” is an elegiac. As we follow the artist in her solitary but common path, we join in her efforts to plumb the significance of being.

 

-Maurizio Pellegrin, Director

National Academy Museum