Kelsey Kuykendall is a multimedia artist born, raised and educated in Southern California. Working with found domestic substrates such as mattresses, carpet padding, upholstery and tablecloths, Kuykendall employs resin to preserve materials in a state of decomposition, drape, or collapse.

Into these abject surfaces, she inlays glass, wood, and other ornamental fragments. Icons of containment or scrutiny—keyholes, spurs, plaques, braided hair, trophies, floral border motifs—appear not as static symbols, but as openings, traps, thresholds, or orifices.

Further layers of translucent glaze-painted imagery – sourced from vintage Playboys, hunting magazines, taxidermy guides, Americana nostalgia, and cinematic stills – are then added, creating a loaded, but ambiguous symbolic cluster.

Drawing on visual strategies historically coded as feminine (embellishment, pattern, etc.), her work often centers on the deadpan reframing of visually compelling traditional gendered iconography – duck decoys, equestrian tack – in ways that both exaggerate and undermine its symbolic significance, producing artifacts of exquisite and timeless indeterminacy.

In her sculptural works, Kuykendall deploys slumped glass, molded plastic, and experimental castings to reference folkloric decorative traditions, while invoking the material interrogations of Modernist art making as performed by Eva Hesse, Les Peintures Actuelle, the Post-Modern “Pictures Generation”, and local affinities including Elliott Hundley, Alexis Smith, Kaari Upson, Jennifer Pastor and Jill Giegrich.