WORK > Exhibitions

Keltner's Picturing Me is an installation as self-portrait, made of the stuff of her life: scribbles in school notebook margins, CDs, sheets of slides, and used datebook pages hang next to things that are more obviously monumental like a school achievement award or a tennis trophy. All of this is organized in a grid, marked out using thread pinned onto the walls, to lend a coherence and organization to the layout. While portraits are typically a direct image of someone or thing, and in contrast to contemporary practices of memorializing parts of our lives, predominately in virtual space with straightforward curated and controlled images, the artist proposes ephemera representing events and moments in her life as an intimate form of sharing, similar to looking through a private scrapbook, to flesh out a picture that is fuller than just an image.

Amidst this self-presentation, there are current works that similarly present a portrait of something that is not directly there. Keltner continues her exploration of the element of trace in artwork, recording an inverse image of something that was once there. The exhibition as a whole proposes an alternate portraiture, relying the physical representation of an event to “paint” the image.