KELA
KELA (Akela Portee) is an analogue photographer, woodworker, writer, filmmaker, and curator who has exhibited across South Carolina as well as the Eastern Seaboard of the United States. She is a two-time grant recipient from the South Carolina Arts Commission and completed a residency at the Redux Contemporary Art Center in Charleston. Recent exhibitions in South Carolina include venues such as 713 Studios, Boyd Innovation Center, Goodall Gallery, Redux Contemporary Art Center, One Columbia, MUSC Wellness Center, and 11th Annual ArtFields Festival. KELA’s publications include books and magazines such as Painting Our World: Personal Stories of Artistic Ingenuity and Triumph, an exhibition catalogue by Praxis Gallery, The Purposeful Mayonnaise: A Literary & Art Journal, Volume 2, Issue 2, and The Huts Magazine: Issue 4.
The analogue photography remains captured by 35mm film, displayed in handmade wooden frames created by KELA herself, and employs multiple techniques such as double, triple exposure as well as utilizing lomography film. Based in nature, the photographs often portray models interacting with landscapes or depicts dramatic closeup shots of various foliage. The grainy texture of the film along with KELA’s use of soft, natural lighting creates a thoroughly retro experience.
Whether using herself or others as a model, the striking poses and facial expressions of the figurative photography expresses a range of emotions anchored in confidence and sensuality. KELA’s use of multiple exposures creates apparitions of figurative subjects which enable the viewer to ponder the subject’s face or body flowing transparently against skies or trees. These deeply poetic works appear carefully shot and staged, rather than improvised, much like a theatre director organizing a production. Ethereal and mysterious, much of the photography may be reminiscent of theatrical presentations of everyday life captured in postmodern arthouse films such as David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. KELA’s works utilizing analogue photography convey a vintage aesthetic alluding towards imagery appearing to offer flashbacks of the 1980’s.
Unspoken (pictured above) depicts shadowed foliage against a backdrop of extreme red sunlight. The soothing neon pink of the sky and silhouette portion of the palm tree evoke symbolism based on locations of the American South such as Miami or Charleston. Deeply tropical and exerting a great sense of humidity, the piece amplifies pop art aesthetics by using nature as a prop to express heat, sunshine, and recreation.
KELA can be described as a thoroughly gifted photographer who ratifies new communicative methods on how we interpret realism through the grainy lens of format photography. Her poetic nature compositions are instilled in a deep sense of invocation of meditation with phantasmal connotations through methodical use of well-executed acting by models and carefully selected landscapes. These prints bloom towards an understanding of how relationships between figures, nature, shadow, and light can be utilized to portray vintage, phantom, spiritual, and trance-inducing imagery. KELA expresses theatrics with subtlety and form, making her artistry an invocation of deeply philosophical and poetic interpretations and inclinations in image-making.
