All photos © Klea McKenna

ALMA, 2017

Single channel video: 9 minutes 37 seconds

More films by Klea McKenna, please visit HERE

Klea McKenna is a visual artist who also makes films and writes. She is currently a Guggenheim Fellow in photography. Her work has been shown and published internationally. Her photograms are held in several public collections, including SFMOMA, LACMA, Getty Museum, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the US Embassy collection, The Mead Museum of Art and The Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Klea is represented by EUQINOM Gallery in San Francisco.

In addition to her own art practice, she was co-founder and photographer at IN THE MAKE, an online arts journal that published studio visits and interviews with over 120 West Coast artists from 2011 to 2015. She is the daughter of renegade ethnobotanist Kathleen Harrison and the late psychedelic philosopher Terence McKenna. Klea lives in San Francisco with her partner and their young children. Her first monograph, Witness Mark, was published by Saint Lucy books in 2023.

Witness Mark brings together five bodies of work (made from 2013-2019) that trace an arc of experimentation and a near spiritual commitment to deep observation of the world around us; from the intricate patterns of nature to the labored and intrinsically flawed patterns made by human hands. Beginning with Rain Studies and Web Studies, photograms made outdoors at night in the darkness of the Hawaiian rainforest, McKenna coaxes analog black and white photographic materials to record evidence of broken patterns in detail beyond what is familiar to our eyes, the prisms of light inside each raindrop and the damaged architecture of a spider’s web.

McKenna’s intense physical process of embossing photographic paper into textures in the landscape is evidenced in the series Automatic Earth, which are “photographic rubbings” of the rings of trees, and Faultlines created with the ruptures, imperfections and physical scars of history written onto the landscape. Generation is a series of “photographic reliefs” made using a giant etching press in total darkness to emboss textiles into photographic paper. These objects are rich with touch, their patterns and flaws telling stories of colonialism, migration, and women’s labor and sexuality.

Witness Mark by Klea McKenna
Saint Lucy Books, 2023
Hardcover with vellum dust jacket, 230 pages, 2 gatefolds
ISBN 979-8-21817-331-9

All photos © Max Kellenberger

Tower of Babylon, 2024

Single channel video: 52 seconds

More films by Max Kellenberger, please visit HERE

Max Kellenberger was born in 1956 in a small town in Central Switzerland. He started taking pictures at age ten. After working as a photojournalist and commercial photographer in Switzerland, Kellenberger moved to San Francisco in 1992. For the last 20 years, he has focused on fine art photography.

Max has been creating images using a variety of techniques. More than ever, he is drawn to working in the darkroom and its less predictable results. In 2021, Kellenberger started making short videos. It’s a whole new world, and what an amazing one for that—a moving world, a sounding world.

Kellenberger’s images have been shown in galleries and published in print and online both in Europe and the US. He has been a recipient of the 20x24 Camera Grant from Polaroid and the winner of the Golden Light Award from the Maine Photographic Workshop as well as a Professional Photographers Award from The Santa Fe Workshops. His images are in numerous private collections, such as those of Elton John, Graham Nash, Frazier King, and Joaquim Paiva, as well as in major collections such as the Polaroid Collection and the Lucerne State Collection. Max is represented by Corden|Potts Gallery in San Francisco.

Kellenberger lives and works in San Francisco.

“The little boy was sitting at the balcony door. It was a grey day. He was looking out from behind a small crack between the two curtains. Silent, motionless. When I walked through the room again after two hours, he was still sitting there. Silent, motionless. In the evening he proudly showed me a small sheet of paper. On it was written in shaky, unpracticed handwriting:

1 tit, 3 sparrows, 1 blackbird, another sparrow

What else had he seen in all that time? The white metal railing of the balcony, its grey concrete floor, and the sky, the wide empty sky. Where they come from and where they go. The birds. And us. Twenty years later I was standing next to him on the deck of the large cargo ship. The white metal railing, the water, and the wide empty sky. A long time passed. Then I heard the shutter of his Leica. Since then I’ve often stood beside him and waited till I heard the shutter. Often for a long time. And sometimes nothing at all happened. Nothing. Looking. Looking. Totally in the picture. My brother Max.” - Daniel Kellenberger

Was im Licht erscheint (What Appears In the Light) contains about 40 years of Max Kellenberger's viewpoint on the world. Kellenberger, who has slowly observed things around him at his own pace since he was a young boy, captures the light's everyday scenery, the lines and sides of it, and the darkness from his own orderly perspective. The 41 images that are firmly embedded in the book are viewed according to the artist's static breathing.

Was im Licht erscheint by Max Kellenberger
Datz Press, 2018
Hardcover, 48 pages
ISBN 978-8-99760-533-0

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