Selena Kimball

Ghosts in

September 14—October 21, 2023

Opening Reception: Thursday, September 14, 6—8pm

“When you cut into the present the future leaks out,” wrote William S. Burroughs. So, what happens with the past?

Selena Kimball cuts. She cuts into the daily news, events, and images taken from the New York Times to create a newly liminal landscape. For the last seven years she has been collaging a continuous scroll from physical fragments of the newspaper. For Kimball, cutting into the present will let the past, as well as the future, leak from the cracks in the here and now and from the spaces between the pages.

The current installment of this work on view at Ulterior is inspired by what Kimball believes to be the earliest American cut-paper project, colloquially referred to as Jefferson’s Bible. Thomas Jefferson, late in his life and in secret, took a knife to the New Testament. He cut and pasted a version that kept only the rational and plausible stories, which he then arranged in chronological order, leaving out what he considered the irrational bits, including the miracles and the circuitous retellings. The marginal stories that Kimball feels more connected to were removed in Jefferson’s version of the Bible, creating a divided world. Kimball’s work pays homage to the fragments of text left on Jefferson’s cutting room floor, which she reimagines as a founding text that continues to shape the American landscape.

This action of cutting and pasting allows Kimball to physically and conceptually engage with a broad expanse of time that exceeds her own lifetime. She works on sections of her newspaper collage for months, sometimes years, until a passage makes sense to her or is destroyed all together. Then, she digitally scans the newsprint collage and translates it section by section into CMYK silkscreen paintings. While hand silk-screening the images onto linen, she is in physical contact with the work, often leaving traces, such as footprints, behind. By scaling these paintings to the dimensions of her body, Kimball achieves a concrete dialogue with a mutable present and an imagined past, and her experience moving in between the two. Kimball’s process connects “self” and history, the anchoring of both time and body. Ghosts in is Kimball’s first solo exhibition at Ulterior Gallery and opens on September 14, with a reception for the artist from 6 to 8 pm.

Selena Kimball (b. 1973, Bangor, ME): Kimball received her M.F.A. from Hunter College in combined media in 2007, following a B.F.A. in sculpture from Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI in 1997, and currently works and is based in New York. Her projects develop from a historical text she investigates through translations into collage, painting, sculpture and installation. An avid researcher and a writer, Kimball has co-published several books and articles. Her paintings appeared in Recurrent at Ulterior Gallery last year, and her work has been exhibited at venues including: Wolfstaedter Gallery, Frankfurt, Germany (2018, solo); 1GAP Gallery, Brooklyn, NY (2017, solo); Bates College Museum of Art, Lewiston, ME (2015); the Katonah Museum of Art, New York, NY (2013); the Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME (2011); the Center for Contemporary Art, Warsaw (2004, solo); and the Museum of the Romanian Peasant, Bucharest (2001). Her work has been reviewed in The Boston Globe, The New York Observer, and Frankfurter Allgemeine among others. Kimball was a NYSCA/NYFA fellow (2020), MacDowell Fellow (2017,2011), a recipient of two Pollock-Krasner awards (2021, 2015), a Jerome Foundation grant (2015), and an Asian Cultural Council award (2018).

Press Release PDF

List of works

Press

BOMB Selena Kimball Interviewed by Anton Ginzburg: Using Collage to Rearrange Historical Narratives. September 20, 2023