Memories Cause Love | Kailey Coppens
Opening reception:
Artists’ Talk:
Through disparate approaches, Elizabeth Alexander, Mara Trachtenberg, and Kailey Coppens explore domestic interiors as richly layered visual and psychological terrains where identities, values, and memories are formed.
About “Memories Cause Love”
Kailey Coppens exhibits a small selection of framed mixed media works as well as sculptures. Coppens takes a layered graphic approach to create intimately scaled images of empty interiors. Visual composites made with memories of the numerous spaces they have inhabited throughout their life, rooms are described by intersecting lines of bold contrasting colors, modestly skewed perspectives and slightly disproportionate architectural elements. Wallpaper stripes, floor tiles and area rugs are alluded to, but it’s the emptiness that feels the most defined in their small framed works, as well as their coinciding 3-D dioramas.
In their statement, Coppens writes “ I treat the visual language of home, fabric, trim, hardware, and framing as a vocabulary for fragmentation and repair, presenting domestic space as a container of memories and narratives(…) I explore transitory spaces and thresholds through imagery of windows and doorways, which bridge interiors and exteriors.”
About Kailey Coppens:
Kailey Coppens is a multimedia artist who examines the emotional architecture of domestic space through a materially driven, process-oriented practice. They studied Painting and Interdisciplinary Media at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Using found, mass-produced materials, Coppens constructs sculptural works that exist between object and environment, artifact and interior. Born in California, raised there, as well as in Texas and Massachusetts, their work reflects a life shaped by transience and engages with the ways spaces are built, remembered, and often abandoned.
Their work has been exhibited nationally at institutions including the Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts (TN), Overlap Gallery (RI), and A Space Gallery (NY), and has been featured in international publications. Coppens is the recipient of the Evelyn Claywell Absher Award for Abstract Art, the Rauschenberg Medical Emergency Grant, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, the Monson Arts Award, and the Marcia Lloyd Auction Award. They live and work in Olneyville, Providence, where they maintain a studio practice and work as a teaching artist and picture framer.
