Kristie Keenon Artist & Educator

About Kristie Keenon

Kriste was born in Lansing, MI on the 52nd anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s birth, 01/15/1981.  She is a painter in Chicago, IL.

Kristie graduated from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2005.  Upon graduation, she acquired gallery representation from Art Murmur Art Gallery in Los Angeles, CA and from the Marc Rubin Gallery in Chicago, IL.  In 2010, Kristie graduated from Columbia College with her Masters in Art Education.  She spent a year teaching art in Chicago's South side projects, Altgeld Gardens.

I am a woman. I am white. I am queer. These conditions are important in my external and internal life. They have influenced the lens through which I see the world and how I am perceived by the world. The paintings I create are responses to these perceptions. 

People of various status and ethnicities often populate my work as a means to reference the many facets of gender, class, race and queerness. I explore the systematic ideals of the status quo and reconstruct images to examine the matters surrounding identity and authenticity. Working from my own collection of photos and found images on social media networks, I alter the original images on a computer: colors are heightened, forms are redefined and occasionally environments are remixed. These complexities are then further translated through the process of painting. I present transient moments in people’s realities through my abstract perceptions. The intentional abstraction reconstructs preconceived notions and is visually pleasing. The stereotype becomes idiosyncratic.

Our daily lives are inundated and entwined with digital media, visual images and hype but this does not mean that our physicality or reasoning is compromised but changed. In contrast to the rapid evolvement of social, political and economic conditions in today’s media, my work appeals to the deeper human emotion that transcends time.  My paintings record the experience of making art and the pure communication of thought/perception.

My work operates like memory by confiscating and quoting already existing images. Through painting, I transform overly familiar stereotypes into a disquieting experience. Selective environments and forms emphasize matters concerning gender, class, race and queerness. Conceptual associations become subliminally dismantled for intimate contemplation and rumination. Capturing the immediate accedes that my paintings reverberate with a fierce expectation, suspended on the fringe of fluidity.