Along the roadsides you can find remarkable displays of quirkiness, independence, patriotism, and artistry. On my day-to-day travels a camera is my most constant companion and I often stop to take pictures. Whether it’s a farmer painting a mural on a barn, a house draped in flags, graffiti commenting on the state of the union, a family constructed of hay bales, a street singer dressed in a negligee and heels – I find it a form of folk art.
It’s fleeting. It’s fascinating to me.
I am drawn to large parades and exuberant crowds, photographing the Women’s March on NY, NYC Dance Parade, and SantaCon in the years leading up to the pandemic.
During 2020-21 the world become much smaller. I began an interactive community project, Synergy, to keep connected with other creatives. Posing a suggestion, I would ask people to respond to the prompt. Inspired by mail art, this art was emailed and posted to a website created for the collaboration LonnaKellyStudio.com
My international Mail Art project brought responses from over 60 artists from Dutchess County to Germany, Italy and England.
As for photography, as I worked through the year, I became focused on a smaller vision – what I was finding in the sky and at my feet. Every day that I went to the park to run, I shot the same tree with an ever-changing sky backdrop, the Pandemic Sky. At my feet I found plants, mushrooms, and discarded objects for closeup. A photo technique used to capture sunbeams and the reflections they can produce created surreal photographs that I like to think of as potential portals. From the earth to the sky, nature sustained me.
Collaborations and community have become a large focus. My postcard series 2016-present represents a mail-art project in which I ask people to take my designed postcard, modify it in any way, and return to me by mail.
2021 Art Reborn: 100 Mannequins is a collaborative project financed by the Daniel & Trudy Regan Foundation, with over 100 mannequins given to artists to modify.
My mannequin, Our Mothers/Ourselves celebrates Mothers but also recognizes the complex relationship children/daughters have with their Mom’s and incorporates fiber, photographs and text. Backwards printing of quotes from family and friends forces the viewer to read, think about the content, and how communication in families is so easily misinterpreted. Recent attacks on women’s rights dictated that I address the fact that women, and so many others, in this country remain second class citizens.
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