Chicago photographer Kelli Connell steps into the body with expansive Elmhurst present

Relationships, encounters and their typically fraught dynamics pervade Kelli Connell’s considerate, quietly provocative photographs, which discover themes like queer identification and photographic fact.

Starting Saturday, 53 of Connell’s photographs will unfold throughout two exhibitions contained in the Elmhurst Art Museum, the largest-ever show of Connell’s work within the Chicago space. Until final 12 months, Connell was a professor at Columbia College Chicago, the place she mentored dozens of aspiring younger visible artists and established herself as a part of an vital group of Chicago photographers exploring a particular model of psychological portraiture.

Allison Peters Quinn, who took over as govt director and chief curator of the Elmhurst Art Museum in 2024, believes Connell ranks amongst Chicago’s most vital photographers however has not obtained the eye she deserves.

The touring exhibition “Living with Modernism: Kelli Connell,” Peters Quinn hopes, will rectify that slight.

“She has not had much exposure here,” Peters Quinn stated. “People know her personally as a great mentor and instructor, but they don’t know so much about the trajectory of her work. These were great projects, and because they span multiple years, you can really get a sense of what she does.”

Co-organized by the Center for Creative Photography on the University of Arizona in Tucson, Cleveland Museum of Art and High Museum of Art in Atlanta, “Living with Modernism: Kelli Connell” spans earlier work and new. The smaller of the 2 options eight recent photographs commissioned by the Elmhurst Museum which might be a continuation of Connell’s “Double Life” collection, which first gained her widespread consideration in 2007 on the Yossi Milo Gallery in New York.

The different showcases 45 of Connell’s large-scale photographs from her well-known collection “Pictures of Charis.” The collection, which started with {a photograph} Connell took of her then-partner Betsy Odom on a mattress at a Michigan inn in 2009, was impressed by photographer Edward Weston. Weston was identified for footage he made displaying his mannequin and companion, Charis Wilson, from 1934 till their relationship dissolved round 1945.

Connell, a local of Oklahoma City who grew up in Texas and earned a grasp’s diploma from the Texas Woman’s University, had little curiosity in Weston’s work when she first encountered it as a scholar. But that 2009 {photograph} reminded her of Weston’s well-known picture of a curved physique on the dunes of Oceano, Calif.

Connell questioned in regards to the identification of this thriller girl, who was merely generally known as “Nude” within the titles of Weston’s images. She in the end discovered it was Charis Wilson and found that Wilson was an aspiring author who equipped the textual content for Weston’s well-known 1940 images e book, “California and the West.” The muse later wrote a memoir known as “Through Another Lens: My Years with Edward Weston.”

“I was like, ‘This is amazing,’” Connell stated. “She is hilarious. She is really witty. I want to know more about her.”

That began the odyssey that grew to become “Pictures for Charis.” Like Weston, who obtained a Guggenheim Fellowship to undertake the 1,110 images of the American West that might make up his 1940 e book, Connell additionally obtained a fellowship. From 2014 by way of 2022, she returned to lots of the websites Weston featured, however with Odom serving as her mannequin and muse. She made not re-creations of Weston’s photographs from some 80 years earlier however modern re-interpretations and responses filtered by way of her analysis on Wilson, who died in 2009.

“Isn’t it crazy,” Connell stated, “that I went down a rabbit hole to spend so much time with this woman that I’ll never meet?”

Connell’s large-scale photographs will line the partitions of the Elmhurst gallery, and 48 of Weston’s classic 8-by-10 prints from the Center for Creative Photography might be proven in flat vitrines within the heart of the house. The association will enable viewers to look throughout the room and see the multilayered connections between the 2 our bodies of labor.

In the smaller of the 2 exhibitions, “Double Life,” Connell makes use of digital manipulation to make it seem that her topic, the mannequin Kiba Jacobson, is enjoying two completely different folks or maybe two sides of the identical particular person in a variety of settings and actions. Jacobson has served as a mannequin for the collection because it started in 2002.

“The ‘Double Life’ work started to really take off,” Connell stated, “because it hit at a time when people were talking about truth vs. fiction in photography. People were just starting to use Photoshop compositing. Identity was also a topic that was starting to come up.”

The newest eight photographs within the collection had been taken in Mies van der Rohe’s 1952 McCormick House and might be exhibited there. The modernist single-family house was moved from its authentic location within the Nineties and is a part of the Elmhurst Museum campus.