Indianapolis, IN
If I told you that Kristen Kloss is a self-taught abstract artist who works improvisationally and primarily in the medium of appliqué, affixing colorful tissue and decorative papers to canvas and other two-dimensional surfaces, you’d really have no idea what she makes. That’s how good art works: it defeats its own description. And yet, the drive to describe is hard to resist, especially the longer one looks at Kloss’s collages, richly layered with strands, swaths and filaments of multi-hued paper. The trick is to stray from the surface into the associative, to convey how a tondo in those murky shades between blue, green and yellow speaks lushly of underwater seaweed forests, the kind in which you would swear you’d seen a merman swim past. Or how a second canvas, covered in hot shades of magenta, yellow and orange, might as well be a prehistoric scene of raging volcanoes and flying pterodactyls. These and other landscape visions may not be intentional, yet they nevertheless rise uncannily from Kloss’s unique way of gluing paper.
—Lori Waxman 2019-05-01 12:07 PM