Kelsey Shwetz

Born in 1986 in Canada
Lives and works in New York, NY, US​

Kelsey Shwetz received her MFA from Columbia University in 2022 where she also taught Painting as an Assistant Adjunct Professor. She is a three-time recipient of the The Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant, along with grants from Canada Council for the Arts and the Mayer Foundation. She was awarded fellowships by the Vermont Studio Center, The Choy Family, Ellen Gelmen, Columbia University and CanSerrat Residency in Barcelona. She has exhibited in the United States, Canada, Slovakia, Stockholm and Mexico; her solo exhibitions include Half (Los Angeles), cadet capela (Paris) and Coulisse (Stockholm) in 2023.

 Shwetz’s practice is concerned with nature, climate, the weather, and mythology. Situated in the lineage of landscape painting, her canvases are spaces of modified or accelerated growth, uncanny perspective, and architectural folly. Recognizing that a wholly imaginary or fantastical landscape allows a cool distance between the image pictured and our feelings about the real world, Shwetz weaves passages of nature -including those human made- that are recognizable, reminding us of the tender parts of our world that we stand to lose by ecological indifference. Transformation figures heavily in her work, spaces made of disparate material and time blend into each other and geological forms create portals and shifts in the space of the canvas itself. Drawing from Cathedral Architecture, kitsch, sci-fi illustration and, recently, 17th c Netherlandish painting, Shwetz describes a mythology where geological forms, flora, and weather are protagonists. A human presence and cultivation is often indicated without explicitly picturing a body. She paints liminal or psychological threshold spaces, an atmosphere where action has just occurred or is about to unfold. There’s no sign of cataclysm but there is a throb of foreboding.