Bio
Born and raised in Massachusetts. Her work has been shown throughout the U.S. She has been the Dean’s Summer Graduate Research Fellowship and the Mary Lou Osborne Award at UC Davis. Her work has been shown at Root Division, Palette SF, Irving Street Projects, Luggage Store Gallery, Southern Exposure, Incline Gallery, on-off.site, & E.M. Wolfman Gallery. She has been the recipient of a Zellerbach Family Foundation Grant for Community Arts in San Francisco.
Kelley O’Leary is an interdisciplinary artist, moving between image-making, sculpture, installation and video. Her practice explores how humans, natural systems, and the digital world are interconnected in ways that ask us to consider ourselves as part of an unimaginably large and strange whole. She holds simultaneously the reality of destruction as well as the deep potential for what can come. Working as a scavenger, she employs walking as a means to collect detritus in both physical and photographed form and engages in virtual walks, employing language to mine the shores of the internet for imagery through various search engines. Pulling elements from her surrounding environmental contexts evokes the mesh of deeply interconnected life forms. Working from these found objects and imagery, her constructions oscillate between the familiar and the strange. A repetitive transformation of materials occurs as the process passes in and out of physical and digital dimensions. In this world, the hierarchical relationship between original and imitation is being deconstructed.
Selected Work
