MAIN GALLERY
Transcendence – Kata Mejía
March 10 – April 14
Opening Reception: March 10, 7-9pm
Transcendence is a collection of work created between 2007-2017 by Kata Mejía that includes paintings, photographs and performance art.
After the death of her youngest brother, who was kidnapped and murdered by Colombia’s Farc terrorist guerrilla in 2006, Mejía started a series of performance art installations that explored life, death and sorrow. Mejía used her work as a cathartic mechanism to help her deal with pain while simultaneously addressing violence, kidnapping and human rights issues. In her paintings, paint strokes are layered to create abstract images suggesting physical transition and spiritual transcendence. Similar to the way places and images blend in dreams, for Mejía painting is meditative. “My unconscious thoughts and feelings are revealed through imagery that often reflects various aspects of my life and is reminiscent of places I have visited, physically or mentally, in dreams.”
Transcendence refers to a common thread in Kata Mejía’s work in which spiritual transcendence is explored ritually through various symbolic elements.
Kata Mejía is a performance artist and painter. She earned her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2004. She earned her BFA from Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Medellín.
She has been awarded several grants and scholarships, including a 2009 Fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, the James Nelson Raymond Fellowship in 2004, the Trustee Scholarship from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago, a Colombian Government Scholarship for Graduate Studies abroad, and a Graduate Studies Scholarship from Universidad Nacional de Colombia in 2002. Kata Mejía has shown her work in Colombia, USA, Chile and Japan.