In the Basile Gallery –

Anna Kell is a former student of Assistant Professor Robert Horvath. Originally from Columbus, Indiana, she has shown throughout the country and now teaches painting and drawing at Bucknell University in central Pennsylvania. This exhibition features some of Kell’s paintings made on Full and Queen sized mattresses in which she incorporates floral patterning, stains, and other features found on discarded mattresses into her compositions.

Anna Kell’s work is an investigation into the way nature is represented in our cultural commodities. She builds paintings and installations out of images of idealized nature: Victorian wallpapers, found paintings and prints, needlework, puzzles, posters, labels, patterned textiles from clothing, upholstered furniture, carpets, floral mattresses and even lampshades. These domestic ephemera become a visual vocabulary revealing the discrepancy between our cultural reality and an illusion of “the natural”.

Beyond the depiction of nature, Kell is interested in the way cultural possessions reveal the desires and values of their owners as they relate to sex, class, and aesthetics. Though the objects are collected in specific locales, they extend beyond the local to demonstrate the influence that mass-production has with the unique culture of any particular place.