April 1: Local Visual Artist Admits Latest Multimedia Work is Crap

Kelli L. Kelley’s latest work is ‘a bunch of crap.’
Wikimesia/Autumn Goodman

Going back to 2010 with this LEO Weekly Fake Issue relic. Remember, this is not real.

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Kelli L. Kelley, a local multi-media artist, admitted today that her most recent exhibit, titled Nine Mirrors in Life’s Hallway, is “a bunch of crap.”

The exhibit consists of nine oil portraits with items such as bottle tops, gum wrappers, cigarette butts and dead cockroaches randomly imbedded in the paint. The portraits picture random characters staring into nothingness; one of them has no arms.

“Each one was supposed to represent a side of each of us,” said Kelley, 31, and a sophomore student at the Hite Art Institute at U of L. “I was having a hard time at work when I did these, and was on a really tight deadline in this class I was taking. I had just changed my major for the fourth time and had to take something to keep my financial aid, so I chose this multi-media free-form course because a friend said it was easy.

“Anyway, that’s how Nine Mirrors came about. And it’s a bunch of crap, I admit it.”

The once-ambitious Kelley added that she started inserting the garbage into the works because “it just wasn’t going anywhere, and I knew I needed a hook. I decided it could represent the waste in our every day lives, and how it oozes from us at all times. Yeah, I know; it’s idiotic. It took the cockroach six days to die, though, which was kind of cool.”

In her artist statement she posted on her Facebook page, Kelley notes, “I want to bring humanity back in touch with itself through art. I was born with something stirring inside that must come out through brush strokes, forms, shapes and new ideas.”

While standing outside Nancy’s Bagel Grounds smoking a clove cigarette last week, however, she admitted she would “just be happy to not still be working at Tumbleweed at this time next year.”