KENZIE WELLS

Beachcomber’s Dream is an outdoor sculpture installation that originally debuted in the Arcade District in Columbia, MO as a part of The Zipper Arts and Crafts Festival, in September, 2023.

This series comments on how the state of pollution today can be seen as both a beachcomber's dream and a sobering reality. On one hand, the abundance of washed-up trinkets and items along shorelines presents an enticing prospect for beachcombers seeking treasures. However, beneath this dreamy surface lies a harsh truth about the impact of pollution on our environment. The installation "Beachcomber’s Dream" captures this relationship, merging the allure of beachcombing with commentary on the future of our planet by visualizing how non-biodegradable materials will integrate into natural landscapes, and how rising sea levels are reshaping our coastlines.

Solo exhibition at Practice Gallery, Philadelphia, PA, June 2022

Triple Point speculates a future secret garden wherein all matter has reached its “triple point” – it is solid, liquid, and gas simultaneously. Setting the scene are rock-like sculptures layered with the residue of human activity and earthy sediments. Found objects are fused and fossilized into structures of polyurethane foam, coated in sand, cement, salt, and neon resin, lit by the soft pink glow of black light.

In this distorted spacetime parallel, temperature acts as time’s non-linear counterpart, revealed through a gradual shift in appearance from day to night. Light floods in through windows during the day and gradually transitions from pink to ultraviolet as the sun sets, highlighting a flow of heat energy that would otherwise be invisible. Past, present, and future geologies coalesce in this queered, otherworldly subspace, making visible a planetary fever.

Personified in this way, Earth’s increased temperatures and weather patterns become relatable, bodily dispositions; a map of being born, alive, and dead. The audience transitions between alternative worlds as they witness a warped intimacy between equilibriums of three. A vision of the way that triple points can reveal invisible environmental secrets, and the hand human activity plays in the heating of Earth’s climate system.

Super Position embodies a sculptural series that debuted at stop-gap projects in Columbia, MO in 2021. The work plays with the multi-faceted nature of the term “super position”. In quantum physics, a superposition refers to a system which is understood as existing in multiple states at once until measured. In geology, super position refers to the sedimentary layers of Earth, wherein the oldest layers reside on the bottom, and the newer on top. I am interested in the queer nature of the old and new, ultimately only existing together- if we were to cut a slice out of the earth, the slice only holds form with all of the ages, layers, and things within it.

Varying states of matter and decay are superimposed on household items within the exhibition. A shoe, mirror, table and chairs, and items from a garage exist in shifting degrees of decay and confusion. The central structure is pedestal or refrigerator-like in form. It hoists a car tire into the air. On the end cap, there is an in-set shelf like an ice dispenser, wherein a neon orange wrench made of resin glows like lava under black light. A jar lays on the floor in front, a liquid resin puddle spills creating what seems to be a chain reaction of resin-flames running up the structure’s side. Each piece refuses to only be one thing, putting the viewer in a glitchy headspace- possibly a mental superposition.

Habitable Zone is a sculptural installation that reveals how intimate and societal structures invade one another to produce a new form: the architecture of the psyche. This constructed scene visualizes a household from a warped side of the universe. Through the mysterious ambience of deep space, a home is pulled through a black hole, its rooms and surfaces wrinkled and misshapen from the concentrated pressure.

My own queer, non-binary mind-house emerges through an intimacy with texture and pattern, setting the scene for a dialogue between mental distortions and capitalistic structures of gender and sexuality. These recurring dualities thread together with a single unified pulse: the marbled pigments of bathroom tile are alive, fluid, and swirling around solid pipes and mirrors. Like scar tissue around a wound, rocky textures and steel bars encase liquid-like ridges of bold colors, externalizing those unspeakable feelings that bleed through the cracks of all human structures with added pressure. Rage, trauma, an undying longing for safe and sacred space.

A refuge of rhythmic oscillations, water pumps the circuitry of all living organisms. In outer space, the stretch between a star and an orbiting planet where water can pool is called a habitable zone. In a house water pools in a bath, a space for restoration, reflection, menstruation, birth. The audience is invited to facilitate the transition between parallel worlds as they peer through their own mind-house to witness a warped intimacy. A vision of the ways habitable zones become politicized and untenable, and how that process becomes a blueprint of our inner architectures.

Gra·di·ence | ˈɡrādēəns; noun

: The absence of a clear-cut boundary between one category and another.

Gradience imagines a metropolitan scene, contorted within a wormhole of warped space and time. Each structure within the exhibition gives form to a physical gray area of jumbled materials and objects from everyday settings. Commonplace expectations are defied, leaving viewers traversing through a new dimension. Domestic and industrial objects have become petrified into rocky, stony slabs, leaving their functional qualities amiss in a condensed and crystallized state.

Through this distorted, dimensional lens, the exhibition probes the constraints of our perception and questions our need to categorize and form binaries. We live in a society structured around the idea that opposites cannot coexist. As a queer, non-binary person, I exist in the gray areas between and outside of this structure.

Gradience is an urban space subsumed by properties of various planetary anomalies where opposites coexist. The icy, blazing surface of the exoplanet Gliese 436 b seeps into structural material layers of the built environment, forming a gradient between human-design and naturally occurring processes. The materials, textures, and colors present in each conglomeration simultaneously call to mind lava and ice, hard and soft, or liquid and solid, blurring the line between these supposed opposites to further break down societal categorization.

Syz.y.gy | ‘si-ze-je

: the nearly straight-line configuration of three celestial bodies (such as the sun, moon, and earth during a solar or lunar eclipse) in a gravitational system. 

SYZYGY Collab is an artist collective founded by and composed of Katie Hubbell, Philadelphia, PA, Kenzie Wells, Tucson, AZ, and Danni O’Brien, Baltimore, MD. The collective was formed after working side by side as residents at the Wassaic Project Artist Residency in Wassaic, New York in 2019. Melding a variety of sculptural materials with video projections, SYZYGY creates immersive installations that traverse the liminal spaces between subconscious dreamscapes and physical reality. SYZYGY debuted at SPRING/BREAK Art Show, New York, NY, 2020, with their exhibition Super Ultra and the Soft Between.

Strange Houses is a series of dimensional paintings and objects that consider the physical and psychological significance of a house from a queer perspective. Structural elements such as windows and railings are abstracted with familiar interior objects and patterns. Mirrors, coffee tables, and chairs take on sci-fi appearances as they are combined with colorful, gritty acrylic paint, simultaneously reminiscent of the texture of adobe and the disgusting neon icing atop a birthday cake. These juxtapositions mimic the alien feelings associated with being queer and symbolize the constant discrepancies between the house of the psyche and a physical dwelling. Using structures and materials discovered on nightly urban walks, this work employs nighttime as a mysterious scene where the familiar becomes magnified, absurd, and even funny.

The Backdrop, an installation exhibited at the University of Arizona Graduate and Alumni Gallery in January 2019, offers a surreal space composed of interior and exterior elements. The crossover between human design and the free forming phenomena of light are observed through an immersive environment of colors, textures, materials, and shapes. Elements were arranged and selected in response to the question: what is a backdrop? In other words, what is behind everything else, or what is the furthest thing we can perceive? During the monsoon season in Tucson, AZ, looming shadows, brickwork, and the mutability of cloud formations become striking markers of dimensionality against a cloudy, gray backdrop. Within The Backdrop these aspects are layered and framed within windows, doorways, and geometric aluminum forms. Both cloudy textures and architectural shapes come together in two and three dimensions, acknowledging the built environment and natural occurrences as flattened, material layers within a singular space. False dimensions and shadows create a sense of movement within the installation, taking elements often thought of as static and playing with them.