Opening Reception and Artist Talk: Out of Order | Let Down
UCF Art Gallery, FL, 32816
Thursday, January 9 2025
Join us for the Opening Reception and Artist Talk for "Out of Order | Let Down" by Kristen Letts Kovak & Grace Mikell Ramsey!
Out of Order | Let Down is a two-person exhibition by Kristen Letts Kovak & Grace Mikell Ramsey. This exhibition explores complex visual language of abstraction, naturalism, and fantasy to engage in dialogue on the nuances of female perseverance. Through visual storytelling, the two artists reflect and represent ongoing issues of female bodies, gender roles, societal expectations, and biases. The intuitive and formal experimentations engage visceral emotions and encourage active consideration and questioning of expectations and consequences for women through our lived experiences.
Kovak’s paintings investigate harmonious states of disequilibrium, reverberating between representation and abstraction. Her works reflect her experiences living with a hidden and unpredictable disability. She resists clarity and swims head-first into uncertain waters. The cumulative effect of her work is of vibrance and animation that welcome the viewer to embrace unexpected detours of creative discovery.
Ramsey’s paintings explore the complexities of nurturing in depictions of motherhood, pregnancy, and the female body—a reflection on intimacy, both its toils and possibilities through storytelling. The paintings function in a dreamlike narrative space between fantasy and reality, but they are rooted in the artist’s personal experiences as a mother: feeling at the mercy of forces beyond one’s control, the way that ordinary choices can be freighted with epic stakes, a notion of being observed and needed that is undercut by feelings of isolation.
Out of Order | Let Down is a two-person exhibition by Kristen Letts Kovak & Grace Mikell Ramsey. This exhibition explores complex visual language of abstraction, naturalism, and fantasy to engage in dialogue on the nuances of female perseverance. Through visual storytelling, the two artists reflect and represent ongoing issues of female bodies, gender roles, societal expectations, and biases. The intuitive and formal experimentations engage visceral emotions and encourage active consideration and questioning of expectations and consequences for women through our lived experiences.
Kovak’s paintings investigate harmonious states of disequilibrium, reverberating between representation and abstraction. Her works reflect her experiences living with a hidden and unpredictable disability. She resists clarity and swims head-first into uncertain waters. The cumulative effect of her work is of vibrance and animation that welcome the viewer to embrace unexpected detours of creative discovery.
Ramsey’s paintings explore the complexities of nurturing in depictions of motherhood, pregnancy, and the female body—a reflection on intimacy, both its toils and possibilities through storytelling. The paintings function in a dreamlike narrative space between fantasy and reality, but they are rooted in the artist’s personal experiences as a mother: feeling at the mercy of forces beyond one’s control, the way that ordinary choices can be freighted with epic stakes, a notion of being observed and needed that is undercut by feelings of isolation.
