Kelli Vance b. 1983 -  Working from staged photographs, Kelli Vance’s paintings borderline on cinematic. Vance’s luxurious and masterly paintings have often presented women in states of anomie or conflict—personal, social, physical. This is the feminine in a quietly hostile environment of her own making, or trapped in a set of expectations that she either works with, to maintain equilibrium, or against, with mixed results—sometimes defeated, sometimes defiant. Vance’s women are in a kind of unseen, unstoppable trouble, or they are recalling it, or are bracing for it. They are often in their final minutes of innocence before the sinister shadow overtakes the narrative. 

As viewers, we shift back and forth between states of admiration of the subjects’ elegance and seductiveness—these women are in control, at the ready, waiting for the arrival of something sublime, or pedestrian, or terrifying—and apprehension concerning their imminent fates. Is the danger roiling up from within, or descending from without? This is gorgeous and unsettling work. 

Kelli Vance graduated from the University of Houston with her MFA in 2008. Her work was recently acquired by Houston Airports in 2021 and is in the permanent collection of the Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art. Roswell, New Mexico. In 2017, Vance received an Individual Artist Grant from Houston Arts Alliance and the City of Houston. She was included in the 2009 Texas Biennial and in 2014 was a finalist for the Hunting Art Prize. Vance’s work has shown across Texas as well as in Los Angeles, Chicago, and New Mexico.