Kelli Vance: Performance Anxiety

Cris Worley Fine Arts is pleased to announce our third solo-exhibition with Kelli Vance entitled Performance Anxiety, opening January 4, 2020 with an artist’s reception on Saturday, January 11th from 5:30 to 8:30 pm. The exhibition will feature new figurative paintings produced in oil on canvas, and will be on view through February 8th, 2020.

Kelli Vance is known for her photorealistic paintings, driven by compelling psychological narratives with a distinctly feminine point of view. In the recent work of Performance Anxiety, Vance explores the vast disjunction between perceived and experienced reality in daily life. Drawing inspiration from Robert Mac Farlane’s novel, Mountains of the Mind, Vance challenges the viewer to examine our romanticized ideals of nature and self.

In works such as Under a Blistering Sky I May Find Myself, and My Thoughts Came Like Balloons Floating Over The Desert, slivers of natural light reveal isolated figures in deep states of rumination. Other works such as, Self Portrait in a Bed No One Sleeps In, and Separation Anxiety, figures tensely contemplate their existence, as artificial references to the natural world conceal their true nature.

Kelli Vance was born in Garland, Texas receiving her BFA from the University of North Texas in 2005 and her MFA from the University of Houston in 2008. She was included in the 2009 Texas Biennale, in 2014 she was a finalist for the Hunting Art Prize, and in 2017 she received a Houston Arts Alliance Individual Artist Grant. Vance’s work has been shown widely across Texas as well as in Los Angeles, Chicago, and New Mexico.