Fredericks & Freiser is happy to current an exhibition of recent work by Katelyn Ledford. Identified for virtuosic trompe-l’oeil and darkish humor, Ledford constructs pictures the place artifice, vulnerability, and bravado collide. Working solely with oil and acrylic on canvas, she renders wooden grain, masking tape, lace, and denim with the charged aura of stage props. In her palms, phantasm turns into efficiency.
On this new physique of labor, Ledford depicts the backs of portray stretchers as meticulously rendered areas the place confession and composure blur. Throughout these surfaces, phrases like let’s return or free are painted with deliberate readability, but their that means shifts as what first reads as materials reality reveals itself as a efficiency of authenticity. Ledford’s realism understands its personal artifice; it interprets sincerity the way in which the web simulates intimacy, by means of repetition, exaggeration, and distortion.
What makes her observe potent is the stress between devotional craft and the attention that each portray and personhood are acts of building. Her trompe-l’oeil labor turns into a metaphor for sustaining the self amid the fixed strain to seem actual. Every picture flirts with undoing, reaching for sincerity so laborious it threatens to collapse with a manic theatricality that feels each courageous and overexposed. The humor right here isn’t aid however strain: slapstick leaking into pathos, camp into confession. These are work that know they’re being watched and reply in sort.
