Keliy Anderson-Staley

For the past few years, I have been making visual memoirs I call “exploded autobiographies.” Immersive, layered and multimedia, the photography-based installations invite viewers to participate in the process of narrative creation. My photographic subjects include the off-grid cabin where I was raised; my father, an artist who chose to live in the woods; my mother who also continued to live in the woods after their divorce; and the biological father I only learned about later in life.

The work takes the form of dynamic, pinned up collages and handmade books. It incorporates my photographs (color, silver gelatin and tintype), manipulated family photographs and documents I have altered through cyanotype, scanning, collage and silkscreen. My provisional collages and artist’s books are each a momentary, ephemeral retelling, a reactivation of the archive, different in each iteration. My process of making and remaking, taking apart and reassembling, define an idea of family as an evolving story, in continual flux. Despite the autobiographical elements of my project, the work explores how public history and private archives intersect and how individual identities are forged in the context of broader cultural developments.

Website www.andersonstaley.com