Biography
Kelly Andres (she/her) is a visual artist, public art curator, and designer whose work focuses on interactive projects for experiential and sensorial encounters. She is interested in creative and/or ecologically themed concepts for public space, rural places, locative tours, research-creation, design-experiments, and enhancing or augmenting art-based experiences.
Her undergraduate degrees are in Studio Arts and Commerce (Marketing). She has a Masters in networked performance art and a studio based PhD in art and environmental humanities from Concordia University, Montréal.
Recent design projects include the design of a mobile app for mapping nature walks and acoustic ecology, a mobile app for customizing interactive art tours, a web/mobile application that explores research through citizen science and beekeeping/hive monitoring, and a rural delivery-routing app for a small business focused on seasonal and locally sourced products.
Her artwork intertwines ecological art practices, plant studies, performative placemaking, co-creative community development, and experiential approaches for multi-species interactions. Recent exhibitions include The Works Festival, Edmonton, Particle + Wave, Calgary, Les yeux dans l’eau, Foreman Art Gallery of Bishop University in Sherbrooke, Sandstone City, The Lougheed House, Calgary, The Garden of Speculations, articule, Montréal, le Centre des arts actuels Skol, Montréal, La Maison des arts de Laval, Laval. Andres’s past work has been generously supported by the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts and the Canada Council for the Arts.
Andres has worked as a municipal public art curator for seven years and lives in rural Alberta in a cabin on the shores of an alkaline lake.
Artist Statement
My work intermingles ecology and energies; from living entities such as plants and micro-organisms; from electronic mediums such as radio waves, electrons, and photons, into interactive installations and performances. I often work with common or overlooked phenomena, due to size or perceived insignificance, such as yeast, fungi, lichen, and water to facilitate a perceptual shift and a relational inquiry; thus, installations and sculptures are participatory and in flux. This process often involves an appropriation of materials and techniques from an unfamiliar discipline into various performative gestures. Past influences are from laboratory science, manufacturing, and horticulture. Projects interweave different techniques into aesthetic forms of amateurism to question knowledge acquisition, failure, the role of the generalist, and techné. Many of the works decompose, gradually breakdown, or synthesize to encourage compositional and material transitions.
I often work with a concept of tender curation where a central component of an artwork requires continual attendance or maintenance. These experiences open to a kind of relational tending to the phenomena assembled within artworks. In this sense, a research-creation methodology evolves as a form of experimental contemporary art practice performed as a spectrum of possible relations.
dreamlag
© Kelly Jaclynn Andres “dreamlag”
01_kja_plantling
© Kelly Jaclynn Andres “plantling”
20_kja_Automata
© Kelly Jaclynn Andres “Automata”