Artist Talk with Klea McKenna

Join us on December 3rd at 6pm for an artist talk with 2025–26 Kala Fellow Klea McKenna. McKenna  will share insights into her work, artistic practice, and about her installation, The Remedy, currently on view in the Kala Gallery as part of What We Hold, New Works by Kala’s 2025-2026 Kala Fellowship artists.

Klea McKenna (born 1980, Freestone, CA) is a visual artist who also makes films and writes. She is a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow in photography and is known for camera-less photography and her innovative use of light-sensitive materials. Her photographic and printmaking work is held in several public collections, including SFMOMA, LACMA, Getty Museum, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the US Embassy collection and The Victoria and Albert Museum in London. She studied art at UCLA, UCSC and California College of the Arts. In addition to her own art practice, she was co-founder and photographer at the San Francisco publication IN THE MAKE, an online arts journal that published studio visits and interviews with over 120 West Coast artists from 2011 to 2015. Klea lives in San Francisco with her partner and their two young children. Her first monograph, Witness Mark, was published by Saint Lucy books in 2023.

Artist Statement

If I think of myself as an ancestor to someone in the future, my audience becomes my descendants, rather than my contemporary peers. How might this change what I make and attempt to communicate through my artwork?  My primary medium has long been analog light-sensitive paper, or “cameraless photography”, but over the last decade I have hybridized these techniques with painting and printmaking.  I intentionally misuse materials in order to find new ways to decipher the textures and patterns of cultural artifacts, both found and imagined. My interest in communication across time is informed by mythology, archeological practices, folklore and futurism. I depict feminine embodiment through a vocabulary of symbolic forms that appear both ancient and manufactured – often representing an ailment or a cure and picturing womanhood as a site of collective problem solving.

“The Remedy” is an in-progress installation that takes the form of a life-sized collage comprised of shaped-plate intaglio prints on rag paper, intermingled with fabric cut-outs. These figures and shadow-shapes illustrate a short story I wrote, which is based on true events from my ancestor’s life as a young Mormon woman in the American West. The scenes I have chosen to illuminate from her life deal with feminine embodiment, an animalistic experience of motherhood, trauma and interspecies gratitude. I draw on archetypes from Euro-American mythology and visual styles from folk art. Their Rich, inky, flawed textures suggest how time, trauma, pleasure and healing are recorded on our surfaces.

Event Details

Date: December 3, 2026

Time: 6:00 pm–7:00 pm

Kala Gallery
2990 San Pablo Ave, Berkeley, CA 94703