Kelly Altman

Artist on VibrantCast

Kelly Altman is obsessed with our positionality and experience in the universe as an observer of the cosmos of which we are composed of and of which we compose. How can we begin to grasp that a size much smaller than the punctuation that will end this sentence created all of the atoms in our 14 billion light year wide universe? How can we understand the temporality and fragility of life in a universe that exercises such a recyclical nature of atoms? Can joy, compassion, and goofiness separate us from being inert, cold space junk? With the vastness of the universe in mind, how might we conceptualize other life forms and their perspectives or experiences compared to our own? To examine questions like these, Kelly Altman creates multimedia paintings and sculptures including realistic portraits of deceased individuals for their family’s keeping, sketches of aliens that depict various human emotion, series of paintings to visualize alternate realities. While she is fascinated with universal properties, her work discusses what it means to be a human in this vast, absurd universe.