"Just Keep Going" Limited Edition Print
This is a limited edition print of a quartet of fugitive ink photograms from the installation “No Feeling Is Final”. The full installation of 140 photograms and 200+ handkerchiefs is on view at SFMOMA December 2020 – May 2021 in the exhibition “Close To Home: Creativity in Crisis”.
“Just Keep Going”
2020
Edition of 300
Each numbered and stamped by the artist.
Archival pigment print on Hahnemuhle German Etching paper
30 x 24 inches
Ready to be framed in a standard size 24x30 inch frame.
The titles come from lines in the Rilke poem “Go To The Limits Of Your Longing”.
You can learn more about the process that led to this work here: https://www.kleamckenna.com/GESTURE-in-quarantine
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This work began as an experiment in how to make photographic art while at home with two small children during San Francisco’s shelter-in-place order. I began making cameraless photographs (photograms) on the roof of our apartment, using the limited materials available to me and the fading effect that sunlight and time inflict on fugitive ink colors. I use old handkerchiefs as my negatives. They are artifacts of personal health and hygiene; intimate objects that have each been carried by someone and absorbed their body’s fluids: snot, sweat, and tears. In another era the gesture of offering your handkerchief was a way of expressing compassion for someone else’s suffering.
As the pandemic unfolds and wildfires compound our collective loss, I have begun to see these images as representing a growing crowd of individuals. The expansive grid is akin to the charts of data I check daily, each time confronted by the limitations of perceiving human experience through statistics. In contrast, the handkerchiefs become ever more imperfect and corporeal—worn, dyed black to block the sun, and then faded by exposure to it, their wrinkles and folds become smoky stains. This transformation has become my mourning ritual. The handkerchiefs are both the source of the images and the remains of the process―shadow skins of the pictures they made.
