Phoenix Print

When painting, headdresses and crowns deify Kate Kelton’s subjects. She uplifts the Unsung Sheroes & Heroes, Patriarchy Smashers, Warrior Survivors, Silence Breakers, Philosophers, Truth-Tellers, Whistle Blowers and Thought Giants of all stripes. She paints her portraits cloaked in the garb of statues Ladislav Šaloun sculpted onto the train station that her great-grandfather, Josef Fanta, designed for Prague in 1901 - 1909. Apotheosis through a reclaimed, reapplied Art Nouveau. Sampling her own lineage, she transforms a historical body of work, itself a thing of lasting beauty; exchanging granite for graphite, plaster for paint. In Photoshop, she first combines the desaturated faces she's found, sourced or shot of her chosen subjects, with the black and white photos from her family and friends, of the statues in situ. Then she uses graphite, inks and acrylic paints and glazes to create the works on panel or canvas, literally uplifting and elevating her battle-weary subjects to the highest reach of architectural strata. ​ 'Ancient and distant godlike beings, surveying a dying empire, trade places with the fresh blood of her subjects. The work presents a tactility against the digitized space, and represents a taking, an acquisition of power back from the tastemakers. Here, the mantle of the artist is above brand influencer, above internet commentator, above mere marketability. In their gaze is a warning, “Art is immortal. Come for me, why don’t you?”' ~ Micah Chaim Thomas "Kate's recent work is a matter of expansion through contrast - she is as ephemeral as her subjects are concrete architecture; she is structural when her subjects should slip through your fingers like too-fine sand. Taken as a whole, the works in her magnificent series Sentry are incredibly intelligent, but when looked at individually, you come to understand that these are statements of life beyond themselves.  The series take embellishments of a Prague train station designed by her great-grandfather, Josef Fanta, and combines these with portraits of women who have stood against the sexual harassment and assault rampant in Hollywood. These women, like Kate herself, have suffered in the era where powerful men, every bit as immovable as the train station, wielded their power without check. The portraits emblazoned on architectural elements, they are marked against the edifice, every bit as permanent, and perhaps even more defining.