2015 - 2006
2015
Re-imagined, Cornell Museum of Art-Delray Beach, FL
Axle inside at Peter’s Projects, Santa Fe, NM
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Re-Imagined at Cornell Museum of Art / Delray Beach, Venus Velvet #4
I appreciate the global reach of my Apple products, however, the wireless democratic pencil is still my go-to tool for capturing creative moments through doodling, jotting notes and sketching.
In 2009, following several years of drought in the southwest, I lost a beloved old apple tree. I mourned it for a year, keeping it as habitat for the robins and redwing blackbirds that perched on its branches. By the second year it was a fire hazard so I took the tree down with my pruning saw. The timing was perfect because I was taking a sculpture class at the Santa Fe Community College. I saw tools, specifically pencils, in the trees limbs.
The pencils were named FUTURE, Alice, Anonymous, OMG, OUAT (in the Santa Fe Community College permanent collection) and Venus Velvet which developed into a series of 4. Venus Velvet#2 was included in the installation ‘Futurology: Welcome to the Third Wave’ in Axle Contemporary’s mobile gallery; Venus Velvet #4 was in Re-Imagined, a group show at Cornell Museum of Art, Delray Beach Florida.
Santa Fe Poet Laureate (2010-2014), Joan Logghe, was gifted FUTURE during her reign for her outstanding community service for spreading the love of poetry.
2013
Loud Whisper, Ernesto Mayans Gallery, Santa Fe, NM
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Loud Whisper, Kathleen McCloud’s 7th solo exhibition at ERNESTO MAYAN’S Gallery, is based on her two-year immersion into the personal collection of papers and artist studio miscellanea she inherited from Emil Schnellock, Henry Miller’s boyhood friend who, during the 1930’s while Miller was living in Paris, became his literary promoter and champion.
Using the archive as a starting point, McCloud picks up the narrative threads of the collection and through paint, ink, paper, and letterpress, creates a travelogue of her sojourn into the past and the lives of others. Rather than keep the voyeur’s distance, she unfolds a body of work that is not about Miller or Schnellock, but about the transformation that occurs when objects and ideas from the past are wedded to the present.
“I’m interested in the stories we record and things we inherit that make up our web of influence. In one of Miller’s essays he quotes 19th century poet/philosopher Amiel, ‘We are all visionaries and what we see is our soul in things’. I see myself in the archive and in the soul searching of Emil, Henry and the other contributors. It’s not about them–it’s about vision, imagination and creation.”
– Kathleen McCloud
2011
Futurology: Welcome to the Third Wave, Axle Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM
Mining the Unconscious, Santa Fe Community Gallery, Santa Fe, NM
Life is moving so fast you’re already a relic of the future. This site‐specific installation at Axle Contemporary mobile gallery looks to the insights of the Futurists of the late 20th century, particularly the ideas presented by Alvin Toffler, who referred to the technology/information age as ‘the Third Wave’. How do we navigate the sea change, what will fall away, what will be transformed, and what to do when big waves converge. It’s my first ‘exhificition’ on new media culture.
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2010
Abstraction, William Havu Gallery, Denver, CO
Texas National: 2010, Cole Art Center, Nacogdoches, TX
Inna Gadda da Vida, Ernesto Mayans Gallery, Santa Fe, NM
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Dancing with MIL FLORES
The series, ‘Dancing with Mil Flores’ started with photograms of honeybees and wax comb. They evolved into multi-layered paper, pigment and cloth pieces that are inspired by the bee dance. I was immersed in the magically real world of a Gabriela Garcia Marquez novel with Mil Flores as the beautiful woman, the Muse, the animating force. How many thousands of flowers to make a tablespoon of honey I do not remember. Dancing cannot be measured or understood by ratios and comparisons, only by experience. Maybe dancing with flowers is the taste of honey.
The Garden Series
The garden paintings were inspired by Japanese ‘Ehon’-picture books ( I recommend EHON:The Artist and the Book in Japan). The Chinese and Japanese art historic foundation in the animated landscape speaks to my own sense of place here in the southwest high-desert. I regard these paintings as book covers for stories composed over the time it takes to paint them. The weather, the news, the thoughts, and the music that influenced them are embedded in layers of paint.
Writing Implements/OMG Woodblock prints
Marshall McLuhan- in Understanding Media,-The extensions of Man,1964, predicted that as we move from mechanical time into accelerated electronic/digital time, aspects of life would start moving so fast that all of the linear style specialization suited to mechanics ––think assembly line – would break down and the result would be a return to a more tribal way of living. We are no longer specialists- just humans working from the ground up in a fiber-optic simultaneous sensory world.
Elephirls
She appeared in a painting in 2006. She is part of a tribe that travels the Garden turning garbage, negativity, cruelty, anything that keeps us from peace, into plants. Guardian transformers who are growing in numbers.
2006 - 2007
ORIGINALS 2007, New Mexico Women in the Arts, Harwood Museum, Taos, NM
Language:The Interconnections between Images and the Written Word, Rotunda Gallery,New Mexico State Capitol-Rotunda Gallery, Santa Fe, NM
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