NoCo artist explore cultural ancestry in new abstract exhibition
Dec. 31—Northern Colorado-based artist Jennie Kiessling has always had an interest in abstract art, but she had never connected it to her Italian-American ancestry.
Kiessling's newest exhibit, "Abstraction/Our Ancestors/Altered Books and Paintings," manages to explore each in what she described as an unexpectedly personal installment of work.
"It was incredibly heavy (to make)," Kiessling said. "It's very heavy, in part, because I feel an obligation not to sugarcoat the truth."
Kiessling mentioned several names during her phone interview with the Wyoming Tribune Eagle on Tuesday afternoon — Agnes Martin, Ilya Bolotowsky, Ad Reinhardt and Wyoming-born Jackson Pollock — all abstract expressionist artists that influenced her newest body of work.
However, the central inspiration for the collection was her own grandfather following Kiessling's discovery of his personal prayer book from 1912.
The real pages of the diary, which Kiessling translated herself, offer the perspective of a blue-collar worker living in Chicago during the early 1900s. As an Italian immigrant, it was a time in America when cultural identity, even speaking a foreign language in public, was largely not accepted, and thus suppressed by her grandfather and his family.
To preserve the book, the entirety of the exhibit is painted on cheaper replacement pages as a substrate for her abstract expressionist painting.
"I don't want to make the stories more or less than they are, because there's something about them that is 'everyday,'" she said. "Pain is too strong of a word, but I would say there's a real melancholy over the loss of that cultural energy."
Kiessling said that, by nature of how her family evolved, she sees herself as one of the last to tell these stories of how her grandfather's coming to America changed the course of her family history.
"If you were raised in a neighborhood that is of one faith, and you are of another faith, or you are of another culture and you eat food that's different than the standard in the neighborhood, it is a really difficult thing," she said.
It's a very personal piece, but the true strength of "Abstraction" is that the feeling of cultural dissonance is a universal struggle for many Americans.
The West was inarguably built off the backs of American frontiersmen and immigrants, the latter of which Kiessling explored in relation to Italian-American influence on the once booming mining industry of Wyoming.
What she hopes to do with this collection of work is lead people to consider their family lineage through the joint history of her grandfather's arrival in America and the arrival of abstract art around roughly the same time period.
Kiessling ultimately views this exhibit as a collaboration with her grandfather, who displayed talent as a craftsman, both professionally and in day-to-day life.
"What if he had wanted to be an artist or an artisan, right?" Kiessling said. "He was making all this beautiful stuff, so what if he wanted to be an abstract painter?
"I thought, 'Why don't we make these paintings together?"
It seems he may have ended up an artist after all.
Will Carpenter is the Wyoming Tribune Eagle's Arts and Entertainment/Features Reporter. He can be reached by email at wcarpenter@wyomingnews.com or by phone at 307-633-3135. Follow him on Twitter
@will_carp_.
