Karen Kraven

Karen Kraven’s work facilitates unexpected encounters between textiles, sculpture, and images, be they uncanny resemblances or misleading juxtapositions. Informed by labour, sport, textile arts, and optical illusion, Kraven’s work investigates the registers of the body– how it is fragmented, unstable, and under constant interrogation. The artist exploits the illusion and seduction found in such pursuits to disguise and distort the body’s appearance–or disappearance–whether obscured, sexualized, or beguiled. Shifting and mutating, her works collapse upon one another, mesmerizing us as they reappear enlarged, divided, and flattened. Kraven’s work with textiles is influenced by her family’s knitting factory that stopped manufacturing the year she was born.

 

Biography

Karen Kraven is based in Montreal, Quebec. She holds an MFA from Concordia University where she was a recipient of the Dale and Nick Tedeschi Fellowship. Her work has been shown in solo exhibitions at Axenéo7 (Gatineau), Latitude 53 (Edmonton), the Institute of Contemporary Art (Portland), the Darling Foundry (Montreal) and Mercer Union (Toronto). Karen Kraven has participated in group exhibitions at the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal (Montreal), Triangle - Astérides (Marseille) and Clint Roenisch Gallery (Toronto), among others. She was artist in residence at Fonderie Darling in the Montreal Studios from 2012 to 2015. Karen Kraven is represented by Galerie Bradley Ertaskiran in Montreal. 

 

Recent exhibitions

2022	Le Chiffonnier / The Ragpicker, solo show, Axenéo7, Gatineau, CA Hoist, solo show, Platform Centre, Winnipeg, CA
2020	LULL, solo show, Latitude 53, Edmonton, CA
2019	Dust Against Dust, solo show, Parisian Laundry, Montréal, CA
2018	Pins & Needles, solo show, Toronto Sculpture Garden, Toronto, C