Digital Sisters
2022
These 20 images were made as digital companions to Klea’s ongoing series of very analog, painted, photographic reliefs titled Rainbow Bruise. McKenna composites and digitally collages fragments of her handmade, photograms to make images that solely exist virtually. They are offered as NFTs by Assembly Curated. She continues to push the edges of photography acknowledging the shifting chasm between analog and digital life, misusing and hybridizing her medium. Like their “IRL” sisters, her digital collages present a confounding blend of evidence and fiction within each image, but here the female body emerges as the subject, with a nod to the early human technologies that enabled the creation of effigies like the Venus of Willendorf. However, her icons are based on artifacts of our era: the shapes of unfolded boxes and the packaging of consumer goods, which resemble hands, nipples and vulvas. They reflect the artist’s experience of “mothering through the soft-apocalypse” and appear at once irreverent and sacred, yet another human paradox for our descendants to decipher.