Karen Koltrane Modern Women Cry, Modern Women Don't Cry 

Another Roadside Attraction Gallery is pleased to announce the first UK solo exhibition of Karen Koltrane.

Uninterested in the art worlds, emphasis on career, fashion and signature, Karen Koltranes work is difficult to locate within current critical practice. Though she refutes the term Outsider art in consideration of her work, there are perhaps some parallels in approach and method, if not in intention. Crude in execution and refusing to limit herself to a particular medium or style, her work whilst refreshingly independent is self conscious and aware of it’s own art history. Her approach in its multiplicity is perhaps indicative of our age, but her emphasis is on a developed change and examination of the fractured self, rather than the shallow pursuit of the new. Sporadic in her output, she has been known to destroy whole bodies of work on its completion or as she states “unresolved conclusion.”

Discussions on Karen Koltrane, invariably emphasis the autobiographical elements of her work and the now tired story of, her troubled childhood, her career as a dancer, her connections with Sonic Youth and the New York art set and her late start in the arts under the guidance of Robert Gober. Though important to her practice; her use of biographic detail is more akin to Federico Fellini than Tracey Emin, using it as a springboard for her imagination rather than a set of parameters to work within. Never limited by verisimilitude, her work intertwines fiction with reality, to create a loose narrative that has often been compared to the literary style of magic realism. Her interest in the macabre, popular horror and film noir also filters through her work to produce a haunting malaise, which although melancholic is not without optimism. Through creative invention, her work examines the mythology of history, the subjectiveness of truth and the instability of the authentic.

Karen Koltrane has been exhibited widely in America and Europe including solo shows for Soho 19, New York, Flame Gallery, New York, Musterberg Gallery, San Francisco. She recently took part in a group exhibition in Berlin at Kunstklu that used her work “Provoking Ghost,” as it central theme and will be co-curating the exhibition “Schlock Horror,” at Another Roadside Attraction Gallery in the autumn.

Open Fri - Sun 12 - 6pm or by appointment
http://www.anotherroadsideattraction.org