Visiting Artist: Keltie Ferris

Part of the Tuesday Night MFA Lecture Series at Boston University School of Visual Arts. Free and open to the public. Keltie Ferris is known for her large-scale canvases covered with layers of spray paint and hand-painted geometric fields. Ferris’s pixilated backgrounds and atmospheric foregrounds create perceptual depth that allows for multidimensional readings of her work. Characterized by a continuously expanding investigation into painting, her practice considers a multiplanar site for constructed light and shifting space. In her ongoing series of body prints, Ferris uses her own body like a brush, covering it with natural oils and pigments and pressing it against a canvas, to literalize the relationship of the artists’ identity to the work that she produces. Keltie Ferris currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. She graduated with a BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design and an MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2006. Her work has been presented in exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, the Brooklyn Museum, the Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art, the Kitchen in New York, Saatchi Gallery in London, and the Academy of Arts and Letters in New York, to name a few. She was recently awarded the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award in Painting by the Academy of Arts and Letters.