About the Artist
Raised in Colorado, Krysten Koehn spent her adolescence immersed in the landscape of the Rocky Mountains. It is this landscape and her experiences therein, coupled with consistent itinerancy, that have critically formed her person and practice and surface frequently in the content of her work.
Krysten is currently a practicing artist in the Amsterdam area, where she has lived since 2015. She previously lived and worked between New York and France after completing her MFA in Painting and Printmaking at the Yale School of Art in 2013. Prior to this, she realized a BA in Photography and Fiber Design (2001) and an MA in Art Education (2007). The subsequent four years brought her overseas, first to Kuwait then to Switzerland, where she worked as an artist and art educator. Her current work is heavily process-based, examining themes of the body within the landscape, transience, trajectory, and the assimilation of her body into her immediate context through physical activity.
Ultimately, Krysten aspires to create work that expands awareness by offering a view of her specific experience of the world. Her work places this experience into the context of a greater whole in which individual viewers can find their own experiences and from which they can draw stimulus for embarking on their own while remaining accountable to the ensemble of humanity.
Artist Statement
Our bodies are the only way we have of making sense of the world and everything in it: we experience, understand, and affect everything that is outside of us only with our physical faculties. There is no other way. Wherever I am, I am always in my body. Sometimes, it seems to fit into its surroundings--I feel embraced by a harmony and a congruence with a place. But other times a place feels disparate, like I am only situated on top of a landscape rather than folded into it. There is a lack, or a surplus of some indefinite thing. At these times, my body calls for a reconciliation through making.
An itinerant life has helped me grasp the magnitude of my existence, showing me that it is possible to affect the world outside my own body. (As my world expands, I begin to realize the scope and potential of my existence in it. That is, my world starts to become the world). Consequently, I think a lot about merging into my environment. In some contexts this convergence happens naturally, but others require a negotiation in order for me to establish coalescence with my surroundings. It makes sense to me to find harmony with a place through action. Feeling and navigating that place with my body. Allowing the exploration of that place through specific sensual trajectories. Using my physicality to push into the world around me and allowing it to press back. At times this manifests in the recontextualization of personally familiar objects or actions into an environment I otherwise find inhospitable. In other instances it transpires in a reversal, merging or interpenetration of the traditional roles of the body and the landscape. But always, this harmony is established by the action of bringing into existence something that did not exist before.
My work comes out of a strong awareness of an absence. I am an artist because the world is incomplete, because I need something I can’t find without creating it myself. I want to puncture the boundaries of art so that it more easily seeps into the world and into everyday existence. We need art in order to have a truly authentic experience of the world, to feel alive, and to realize our own agency to affect our personal landscapes.
CV
Education
2013 MFA, Painting and Printmaking, Yale School of Art
2007 MA with Distinction, Art Education, Studio Emphasis Painting, University of Northern Colorado
2007 Post-Graduate K-12 Visual Art Teaching Certification, University of Northern Colorado
2001 BA, Visual Art, University of Northern Colorado
1998 Period of Study in Visual Art, University of Colorado
Fellowships/Residencies/Grants/Awards
The Arctic Circle Residency, 2014
Shortlisted for International Emerging Artist Award, 2014
Yale Art Gallery Wurtele Gallery Teacher Fellowship, 2011-2013
Lockwood Grant for Visual Arts, 2011-2013
William and Mary Burch Grant for Education, 2005-2007
University of Northern Colorado Graduate Student Grant for Visual Arts, 2005-2007
Fred Meyer Fellowship for Excellence in Drawing and Painting, 2001
Augusta Klavon Oyster Scholarship, 2001
Solo exhibitions
2013 MFA Thesis Exhibition
Green Gallery at the Yale School of Art; New Haven, CT, USA
2010 Enlevée d’Experience
Galérie Marianne Zanolla; Vauvenargues, France
2007 Compartments of Experience: Graduate Thesis Exhibition
Oak Room Gallery; Greeley, CO, USA
Selected group exhibitions
2015 Season 2
MPSTN; Chicago, IL, USA
2013 What Have You Done For Me Lately?
109 Gallery; Brooklyn, NY, USA
2012 Comprehensive
Green Gallery at the Yale School of Art; New Haven, CT, USA
Shadows Through a Prism
109 Gallery; Brooklyn, NY, USA
MFA 2013 Exhibition
Green Gallery at the Yale School of Art; New Haven, CT, USA
2011 La Peinture Fraîche: Yale School of Art First Year MFA Exhibition
Green Gallery at the Yale School of Art; New Haven, CT, USA
2008 Reuse 2.0
Bayt Lothan; Kuwait City, Kuwait
2006 University of Northern Colorado Student Exhibition
Mariani Gallery; Greeley, CO, USA (awarded best of show)
University of Northern Colorado Student Art Gala
Tointon Gallery, Greeley; CO, USA
Points of Departure
Oak Room Gallery; Greeley, CO, USA