Kaela Mei-Chee Chambers
Bio: Kaela Mei-Chee Chambers (b. 1993) is an interdisciplinary artist born and raised in New York City.
kaelachambers.com
Instagram: @kaelachambers
Thesis Exhibition
Artist Statement: In 2014, when I was 18 years old, I was in an electrical accident where I was shocked with 11,000 volts, resulting in 11 surgeries to treat the third degree burns all over my body and the amputation of my left hand. All of the subsequent work I have made is an attempt to grapple with the new physical and metaphysical limits of the body I live in. Working through self portraiture, I study my own body as one might study a mathematical problem, searching for what was subtracted or rearranged, what is hidden, what is imagined, and what is a memory. What new boundaries has the surgeon’s incisions drawn on my body, and how does this manifest in the boredom of every day life. I draw heavily on my childhood fascination with Italian Renaissance paintings, from which I learned to draw when I was still in strollers, as well as my years of classical training in figure drawing and anatomy. I believe my work lies somewhere in the gap between quotidian and trauma.Play is a method of working-through; making what is serious more pliable, so that it may be approached, and held in the hand. In my practice, I use play to get at something graver: breakdown, in all senses of the word—as collapse, crisis, or failure; but also as analysis or classification, dividing something vast and unknowable into smaller, more manageable pieces. In the tension between these two forms of breakdown is a site of healing.
My work examines an absurdist desire to define and quantify healing; a frantic need for—and failing of—structure in times of personal and family crisis, and the language constructed around that need. I am interested in the futile: the yearning and searching for solutions to unsolvable problems; the attempts we make at imposing order on situations that are inescapably messy; the inevitable and necessary failure of such attempts.
I play within rhetorics of instruction, drawing from multiple pedagogies to build an autofictional archive. This is a framework for coping that is also a record of coping. These are portraits of my own striving.
L to R: Worksheet No. 15 (page 2), (66.25” x 51.25”, Oil on canvas, 2022); Worksheet No. 6 (66” x 51”, Oil on canvas, 2022); Worksheet No. 77 (66.25” x 51”, Oil on canvas, 2022); Worksheet No. 102 (66” x 51”, Oil on canvas, 2022); Worksheet No. 101 (66” x 51”, Oil on canvas, 2022)
First Year Exhibition
Workbook for the Year of the Metal Rat (Selected Worksheets), (11” x 8.5” each, Inkjet and mixed media on paper, 2020-2021)
