Kailey Coppens
Kailey Coppens is a fiber and installation artist as well as a painter who has typically exhibited in New England. Recent solo exhibitions include Installation Space in Adams, Massachusetts...
Kailey Coppens is a fiber and installation artist as well as a painter who has typically exhibited in New England. Recent solo exhibitions include Installation Space in Adams, Massachusetts, Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts in Gatlinburg, Tennessee, and AS220 in Providence, Rhode Island. Kailey’s group shows include venues such as Overlap Gallery in Newport, Rhode Island, Mosesian Center for the Arts in Watertown, Massachusetts, Arts Center East in Vernon, Connecticut, and Machines with Magnets Gallery in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. Publications include Dovetail Magazine, Artsin Square as well as Suboart Magazine and notable awards cover recognition from a Monson Arts residency in Maine, the Marcia Lloyd Auction Award and a scholarship from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston.
The various works reflect on one common theme; the definition of a home. Having to move frequently throughout her life, Kailey explores the purpose and identification of personal spaces. In the fiber pieces, she often creates objects usually associated with interiors such as handheld mirrors, a locket box, or a spoon. Some of these subjects are ambiguous in abstracted forms which could resemble items such as a baby pacifier, food, or lipstick. The subjects are ‘fluffy’ which connotates the association of the home with kitsch or excessive comfort.
Through retro 1970’s designs containing representation of polyester and plaid-laced interiors in her paintings, Kailey communicates lowbrow taste in association with defining personal spaces. She accentuates the plaid and flannel-like interiors by extending their colors and design to the frame of the painting. In the installations, the viewer becomes confronted by portions of unfinished housing panels with insulation being revealed on the other side, as if to suggest a sample of a home or convey a notion of our personal spaces being under construction. These pieces are as much a critique of personal spaces as they are an expression. How do we define the home? Through comfort? With kitsch and familiarity? Perhaps Kailey’s works are a social commentary on the isolation, separation, and division we apply to our collective selves through identity contained in the concept of personal space.
One of Kailey’s fiber installation pieces (pictured above) contains the siding of a home with fluffy pink carpet in the interior. The windows are non-existent, just cut-out holes. Such a piece communicates as a sample of excessive comfort as even the interior wall becomes laced with pink fiber and the carpet carries striped patterns of pink and orange. Absurd and humorous, these interior fiber pieces reflect a cynical take on how we define personal space through connotations of fragility and shallowness.
Kailey Coppens provokes the viewer conceptually to contemplate on the purpose of design, kitsch, and interiors. These philosophical works drive a conversation towards integrating retro aesthetics with contemporary interpretations as if to suggest we are longing for the past, seeking to escape the postmodern coldness of vast negative and minimal space. Well executed and meaningful, Kailey’s various works holistically connect individual identity with aspects of separation from collective notions of space.
