Caitlin Margaret Kelly is a practicing artist and director of the Power Plant Gallery at Duke University, where she curates exhibitions and programs that examine the breath of documentary arts, from traditional to experimental, intersecting with issues across campus and the local community.  Examples include a first exhibition of the sketches by noted author Allan Gurganus as well as an all audio exhibition on experimental sound called Protest|Politics|Dissent.  Most recently, Kelly oversaw the public programming around the nationally-touring exhibition Southbound at the Power Plant Gallery, which included a “Sit+Chat” series of decentralized conversations with community thinkers and doers, “Ride the Bus”, artist talks while on the road between exhibition venues, and “Call & Response”, a zine featuring North Carolina writers responding to Southbound photographs, among more traditional exhibition programming.

 

As an artist, Kelly’s work is based in intentional interactions with landscapes.  This takes shape in many ways, from photographing the manipulation of interior spaces and the natural world, to physically transforming the photographic material itself.  More regularly Kelly’s photographs explore the subtle intervention by the human hand in natural environments. Photographs of mark making become an allegory to larger relationships between real and perceived dangers and fears.  Her choice of materials continues the thematic bend to the work exploring the fragility and decay inherent in the medium. Through slide film, Polaroid, and black and white processes she is as equally interested in the photograph-as-object as the subject matter it depicts, often deconstructing it from one form, to mold into another before presenting it back to an audience. 

 

Kelly lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina.