BIO / STATEMENT:

  A Grand Rapids, Michigan-born, New Orleans, Louisiana-based experimental media artist drawing from the tactile world, Kourtney Keller has exhibited her work in film, video, and installation in the United States and Europe.   Ms. Keller holds a BFA in Media Arts from Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY and an MFA as a Fellow from the University of New Orleans, LA with a concentration in Digital Media.  She has received Kodak’s Student Filmmaker Award, NextFrame Film Festival’s Editing Prize, and recognition for her most recent project, The DRIVEINEVITABLE, in Art in America (January 2011), in conjunction with New Orleans’ Biennial P.1.5.  Keller's skills are consistently engaged in freelance projects involving video, animation, photography, motion graphic design, illustration, and post-production. 

   I seek to enliven tactile experiments within 4-Dimensional presentations.  Using time to activate elaborate sets, props, and costumes, I explore perception, illusion, identity, history, and memory. In an attempt to build complex yet cohesive dialogues between the handmade and the virtual, I rely on the recorded history of the mark and the persistent nature of memory--both mental and optical. Employing a changing variety of materials mixed into time, my work constructs bridges between sense and sensation in an attempt to convey emotional, ecstatic and subjective realms of the self, especially of myself. 

   My video work is based in the digital realm, but remains anchored to objects, both fabricated and found.  Utilizing projected light to interact with various shapes and surfaces, both public and private, constructed and appropriated, allows me to reinvent environments, thus re-assigning perception and sensation for the viewer.  My experiments are rooted in the optical and physical thrill of changed environments but are best realized when this aesthetic thrill combines with social and personal commentary and critique.