ACE AIR: KIRSTEN MCNALLY
Program: Ace AIR Location: Ace Hotel New York Date of Stay: 04-22-18 Artist: Kirsten McNally
Artist Kirsten McNally spent a night at Ace Hotel New York experimenting with abstraction of the familiar. After extracting photographs from her collection whose anniversary fell on the same calendar date as her hotel checkout, she created a series of research pieces by photocopying, transferring, drawing and weaving cut-up sections of the image together. Kirsten explains:
I work mainly with found image or vernacular photography. Most of the images I have been working with belong to my family. Over the years, many have become jumbled together, making my own archive of images a bit like memories -- hard to parse out whether it was something I really remember, a story someone else told me, or something completely made up. I'm interested in the function these images serve, and how our relationships to photographs in general is changing very quickly... I wanted to see how abstract I could make the image and still recognize it as my family.
Kirsten McNally (b. 1988 in Providence, RI) is a multi-disciplinary artist, educator and administrator. She holds a BFA in Photography and an MAT in Art Education from Rhode Island School of Design. Kirsten works as the Associate Director of Museum Programming at Children's Museum of the Arts in New York City. Prior to her position at CMA, she taught in NYC public schools for five years. In her work, she is interested in reshaping fact, fiction, memory and imagination.
This April, our Artists in Residence are curated by Children’s Museum of the Arts, located in the Manhattan neighborhood of SoHo. Founded in October 1988 by Kathleen Schneider, CMA’s mission is to introduce children and their families to the transformative power of the arts by providing opportunities to make art side-by-side with working artists. In 2010, CMA broke ground on a new state-of-the-art 10,000 square-foot facility that would benefit a range of ages and abilities. The museum has served hundreds of thousands of children and families, 27% free of charge.
