Keltie Ferris: Doomsday Boogie
Doomsday Boogie by Keltie Ferris includes two large-scale paintings in dialogue with a series of thin vertical paintings—physical realizations of the zips whose form originated in Barnett Newman’s The Wild (1950). Armed with a spray of vaporized oil pigments, Ferris has created a fresh and original abstract language that combines her own distinctive approach to mark-making with the history of abstract painting.
In her large paintings, Ferris overlays geometric grounds with graffiti-like markings in airbrush—juxtaposing earthy blacks, greens, purples, and browns with vivid, chemical bursts of gold, pink, acid green, and chartreuse. In select pieces Ferris also outlines the fields of spray in abrupt, vertical strokes of color. These expansive paintings, with their pixelated backgrounds and neon, atmospheric foregrounds, evoke technological cityscapes whose layered space and temporality recall Tron, City of Night, and other cinematic masterpieces of science fiction noir.
Born in Kentucky in 1977, Keltie Ferris received her BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in 2004 and her MFA from Yale University in 2006. Her solo show Maneaters was on view at the Kemper Museum, Kansas City, MO in 2009. Her paintings have been included in group exhibitions at The Kitchen, New York; The Addison Gallery, Andover, MA; the Nerman Museum, Overland Park, KS; and the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Ferris has received a Jacob Javits Fellowship and a Rema Hort Mann Foundation Grant. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
