Kalee Appleton: New Paths

October 26, 2023 – January 6, 2024

Kalee Appleton’s gestural works blur the boundaries between photography, sculpture, and drawing to create immersive, digitally manipulated landscapes. Her looping compositions are evocative of Photoshop strokes, but a metastasis of stylized flora and fauna grows inside each precise picture plane. The repetition and overt falsification of images reference the viral proliferation of digital culture.

Manifesting tensions between image and object, nature and culture, and technology and materiality, New Paths challenges the conventions of cliched landscape photography. Appleton’s CNC-cut wood frames restrict the digital spawn of her imagery and transmute something entirely virtual into the material world.

Kalee Appleton is a photography-based artist and Assistant Professor of photography at TCU in Fort Worth, Texas. Originally from Hobbs, NM, she attended Texas Tech University and received a BFA in Photography in 2005. Shortly after graduating, she worked as a commercial corporate and aviation photographer before attending Texas Woman’s University, where she received an MFA in Photography in 2014. Kalee’s work deals with digital technologies and their effects on society and the landscape. She exhibits her artwork with Ivester Contemporary in Austin, TX. She has shown work at venues nationally, including Filter Photo Space, The Hilliard Art Museum, Houston Center for Photography, and Fotofest Inc.