During a recent visit to the Berlin art fairs I discovered the work of Selene Kimball.

It was the beauty of her collage work that instantly caught my eye. Even though Selena is active in various genres of fine art, it is in my opinion that body of her work where she excels.

Her collage is based on archival documents, beautiful prints found in historic books which she cunningly cuts apart in order to reassemble and create her own interpretation of historical scenes or events. The craftsmanship of the original print, that special quality of aged paper and her skills of cutting and reassembling form a perfect union.

In her own voice:
“My work begins with archival documents (illustrated histories, books of popular science) and develops into imagined reckonings with the history they represent.

My recent work has been focused around constructing large-scale collages, made from small fragments of printed matter. Their scale and image is in dialogue, through gesture or mimicry, with the human body. The work appears as painted or inked surfaces from a distance and the work asserts its materiality, and the slow time and the labor of making, as the viewer approaches.

Up close the holes, the fingerprints, the artifacts of the printing process and fragments of recognizable photographs appear. It is this encounter with the materiality of the work that is part of my investigation – how it looks at a glance and what it reveals (how it falls apart) as the viewer gets closer to the work.”

A native of Maine, Selena Kimball earned her BFA in sculpture from The Rhode Island School of Design and her MFA from Hunter College. Kimball is adjunct faculty at Parsons The New School and Hunter College, CUNY. She lives and works in Brooklyn.

Selena  is represented by the kind people at Wolfstaedter in Frankfurt, Germany.