Kelis George is an Interdisciplinary artist with a focus in photographic mediums. Her practice employs the realities of “self” through portraiture and abstraction. Amongst most people, self image becomes a very prominent issue. This experience creates a certain type of psychoanalysis, that for George, can only be expressed through art making. That work is then used to curiously confront “personhood”. 

 

Fragility and delicacy act as base notes for her practice. Whether that be the fragility of a represented moment or the delicacy of the used material, George finds a way to incite vulnerability at all costs. Throughout her series Shadow Studies and a series of light objects, Shine Like Me and The way the shadows dance, she uses light as a way to perpetuate these ideas. Light becomes an instrument for revealing truths and cradling its subject. 

Within the light objects, she uses thin natural materials and electricity as its foundation which are all risky and delicate. So It becomes necessary for the work to be treated with immense care. Additionally Shadows Studies capture sacred moments of dance where George performatively experiments with the vulnerability of outward expression.

 

Balance is the heart note. Aesthetically, her work calls to melancholy moods described by her use of deep, rich color palettes and habitual shadow work. Where a word like melancholy is classically used to describe sadness, George uses it for its complex and balanced meaning, teetering the line of pain and pleasure. Represented in Sittin’ on the dock of the bay, Jada Brooks, and Lauren Kelly, is a person's relationship with their space where some find comfort in it and others find longing. George captures the melancholic pensiveness that her sitters exude in the composition, with candidness, color, tone, and genuine reflections of their environment. 

 

The top notes are process and patience. Communing with sitters, handbuilding, pulling prints and applying medium all represent an essential, intimate labor that communicates that honesty that George is drawn to. The charm that she finds in photography is its social realism. Its beginnings being built on the desire for self realization, especially amongst her Black ancestors, is what guides the medium for her. There’s a need for patience in her practice, as confronting one's personhood is an existential journey. Being able to facilitate that desire in whatever capacity the photograph lives in, like her prints or light sculptures, is what gives her that purpose.