This latest work collapses many of the innovative techniques Klea has developed over the last decade to create a hybrid approach to image making. She continues to use her fundamental technique of casting raking light across embossed photographic paper, now incorporating painting, and intaglio printing into her process. While this work moves further from traditional photography, it still embraces many of its principles, as well as its potent relationship to the real – formed by the medium’s complicated history with detail and truth. McKenna uses these methods to depict semi-abstract, figurative beings with a confounding blend of concrete evidence and speculative fantasy.

Rainbow Bruise consists of large photographic reliefs (embossed B&W photograms) which are cast in light and shadow, developed, and then painted with jewel-toned fabric dye. These pieces are composed from a vocabulary of symbolic feminine forms: breasts, weighty curves and wombs, shapes that are derived from everyday materials like consumer packaging and unfolded cardboard boxes. The accompanying series of intaglio prints titled Life Hack act as studies for the larger photographic reliefs. In them, the tabs, flaps, and holes of a Kleenex box become unexpected orifices and nipples, creating an aesthetic that blends archeological artifacts with the die-cut curves of mass production. By inking the cardboard boxes and printing them on an etching press she finds an index of corporeal shapes and renders them as effigies – transforming these found objects into objects she’d like to find.

Made in conversation with each other, Life Hack and Rainbow Bruise are evidence of an embodied experience of womanhood. This work is the artists attempt to lean into collapse and reinvention and to find a sense of deep time and divine meaning in the most fleeting sources. Much of Klea’s practice is informed by an archeological perspective; “What if my audience is not my peers, but my decedents hundreds of years from now? What would I make if I knew it would be seen by my great great great granddaughter?”