Posted August 23, 2011 in Member News
Book Launch: Kelli Connell's monograph is published by DECODE Books
Double Life
"Essay by Susan Bright, Interview by Dawoud Bey
Kelli Connell's portraits appear to document a relationship between two women. Their idiom looks familiar: a young couple caught up in everyday moments of pleasure and reflection-a picnic in the park, playing pool in a bar, taking a bubble bath together. The first flicker of unease comes as soon as the viewer registers the similarity of the two subjects, who seem to be twins-and perhaps incestuous twins at that. In fact, Connell has photographed the same model portraying both of the women and then digitally combined the two images so seamlessly that not a trace remains of their construction. Connell has been at the forefront of artists using digital technologies for the past decade, but her art is not about Photoshop. The photographs in Double Life extend far beyond their duplicity into larger and more complex issues of identity and visual rhetoric. As she tells Dawoud Bey in the accompanying interview, "For the most part, I'm not actually thinking so much about representing two females in a relationship. I'm more so thinking about the multiple sides of the self in the overall human experience.
Related Member: Kelli Connell
