Courtney Kessel
Roy Alumn: 2012
My exhibition at ROY G BIV Gallery came shortly after my MFA thesis exhibition, at a moment when I had both momentum and a sense of freedom to take risks with new work. That freedom felt daring and a little rebellious, and I embraced it by creating a new performance installation and collaborating with my then eight-year-old daughter on a series of works.
What I remember most about my exhibition was the extraordinary permission ROY G BIV gave us to experiment. I was trusted with the space and given the freedom to respond to it. In that sense, the experience felt almost like an artist residency: an opportunity to explore an idea, take a risk, and discover something through the process of making.
That kind of freedom is crucial to an artist's development. Nonprofit galleries like ROY G BIV can provide something that more commercially driven spaces often cannot: room for experimentation, installation, performance, and work whose outcome is not yet known. My exhibition came at a pivotal point in my career, as other exhibition opportunities were beginning to emerge, and the new work I created at ROY G BIV became part of what propelled my practice forward.
Today, as the interim director of a university art museum, I understand that experience from another perspective. I recognize how important it is for artists to be given the freedom to experiment, to take risks, and even to fail. Spaces like ROY G BIV create the conditions in which artists can make the work they do not yet know they are capable of making. I remain grateful that, at an important moment in my development as an artist, ROY G BIV gave me exactly that opportunity
BIO: Courtney Kessel is a mother, artist, academic, and arts administrator living and working in Athens, Ohio. Kessel exhibits and lectures on her work nationally and internationally including at the China Art Museum, Shanghai, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Santiago Chile, the University of Alberta, Canada, Centre for Contemporary Culture Strozzina, Florence, Italy, and Exit Art, New York.
Through sculpture, photography, performance, video, and sound, Courtney Kessel’s work strives to make visible the quiet, understated, and often unseen love and labor of motherhood. In the annual performance piece, In BalanceWith (2010-present), Kessel presents a version of the maternal which investigates collaboration with her (now 20-year-old) daughter as a visible, changeable aspect of mothering. Other projects that reflect over a decade of research into the subjective maternal include Mother Lode, Symphony of the Domestic, Cut From the Same, Fabric of Life, and the video SharingSpace.
She is currently the Interim Director of the Kennedy Museum of Art and the Director of Experiential Curriculum Integration at Ohio University. Working toward her PhD in Interdisciplinary Arts, she earned her MFA in Sculpture & Expanded Practices from Ohio University and holds a BFA in Sculpture from Tyler School of Art.