American Snapshot

Kelly Popoff

Kelly Popoff Paints a Child’s Inner World

Essay by Megan Winegardner

Children’s Gaze

 The inner world of children, their experiences, sorrows, interests—while easily abandoned in memory after onset of adulthood—is a shared past. This collective inner life captures artist Kelly Popoff’s fascination; her investigation of their gaze—their place in the world, the special qualities of their private selves—discovers fundamental truths of the nature of American childhood. With startling clarity Popoff materializes—through the blur of remembering—rich, collective interiorities, and reveals the reality of displacement, lack of agency, and restraints that form the core of the lived experiences of Americans who have not yet reached the age of maturity. The artist’s own experiences of a Midwestern, Catholic-schooled youth formulate a starting point for her paintings, yet she also draws from the familiar lives of others, displaying a solidarity that bridges the gap between oneself and these other children. She portrays ourselves to ourselves—we are reintroduced, we remember. In American Snapshot Popoff constructs a space for recollecting, and, through the dimness of our most distant and fragmented memories, she holds a place for us to confront the internal world of childhood, which exists as both other and self.

Portrayals of Adults and Children 

Children must necessarily live in an adult world not created with them in mind, and Popoff illustrates this disfranchisement by invoking the recollection of her experiences within the inner world of her religious family. Here, grown-ups construct distinctly adult communities.

Church attendance and enrollment in religious educational institutions form a strange landscape through which the artist describes the difficulty of self-conscious attempts to perform an unfamiliar dance, the rules of which are known and created by and for an adult population. Although not all Americans have first-hand exposure to religious culture, it still seeps into most aspects of American life, making the particularity of Popoff’s experiences broadly recognizable.

Through the child’s gaze adults are Other, and the relationship between adult and child is seen in the impression adults form in a child’s memory. In her paintings our perspectives look upward to Popoff’s adults—they turn their faces from the child, we see their backs, their towering forms where often only their bodies are visible, their heads disappearing beyond the canvas’ edge. When they face us, their expressions are unsophisticated simplifications; the smiley-faces gazing back at us are masks over the unknown. In Grandmother 2 her eyes display incomprehensibility. While her grimacing face emerges from the American red-white-and-blues consistent throughout American Snapshot, her eyes appear in disconcerting pinkish flesh tones, behind them an absence of gentle thoughts. A significant contrast becomes apparent in Girl 1 and 2, Boy 1 and 2: faded by the dimness of remembering, these children have human faces—the young girls’ serious eyes are softened by time, the boys display a sweetness blurred and veiled in soft luminous reds and pinks. In Popoff’s representation of a child’s view of the immediate persons surrounding their lives, adults are unconscious of observation—the memories that remain with a child long after they grow up are out of the adult’s control. These captured and kept moments depict them as they really appear, not as they imagine themselves or even see each other.

The children’s memories of their peers are not so candid. Here are portraits: the children are dignified with solemnity and gentleness, and faintly recollected expressions are portrayed as their wearers are remembered. They are honored with specificity of features reserved only for them. Adults, here, are often relegated to snapshots and approximations of moments in which they are contained—it is the memory of a certain time that is depicted, a moment in which they were present, not they themselves. Conversely, rather than fragmented moments solidified into the child’s world of remembering, the paintings of children are commemorations of real, dimensional persons. In the child’s gaze children and adults are separated into the misunderstood and the known.

The Unsuitable and Inescapable

Discomfort and misplacement are palpable in Popoff’s paintings depicting adult communities. Children—seen in both domestic and religious settings—display a lack of agency that can be felt. Where adults act as performing members within these environments, the child is an excluded and confused foreigner in their world. In Red Dress, a child transplanted from her own, familiar domain cradles herself with her arms, protectively—she is stiff, bundled into a tent-like dress uncomfortably large and inflexible, its pattern standing out sharply against a more nebulous figure and context. Her face, though shadowed, appears discomfited, yet around her head suspends an aura of naive symbols emblematic of her internal visualizations—ideograms thematic of home, of religious devices, of animal acquaintances. She is encased in the tumult of her thoughts, overwhelmed by her formal garment, and her small arms are her only means of comfort within the solemnity of a church service. Here, church—through a child’s eyes—is a restrictive domain, ill-suited to the comforts of the young. For Popoff’s young subject this institution, where adults perform their accustomed roles, is a language unknown: she is displaced within its constructed formality.

 The vocabulary of an ecclesiastical environment is prominent in American Snapshot: in a surrounding gloom congregations turn to face the holy communion, illuminated by its strange light in Communion. In Doorway church goers—garbed in their Sunday best—are rendered in grays reminiscent of an aging photograph. Their turned-away faces, shoulders, and suited backs alienate a small-statured viewer, while their bodies fully obscure their path and sight into the room, living and intimidating obstacles in the child’s way. The aftermath of a service can be imagined behind these older church members and parents. Particularly affecting, in Sorry For Not Taking This Seriously, a diminutive form proffers a smiling face rendered on a sheet of paper. This is a moment in which artless sincerity is quelled; dismissal by these staid church goers prompts the child’s regret voiced in the work’s title.

Agency and Preservation of the Self

Popoff’s children—young, disenfranchised in their agency—are quelled in their attempts at normalcy in adult occasions. Performances of quiet, internal revolt arise within depictions of children misplaced in American Snapshots; small moments remembered contain significance imperceptible to an adult’s eye. In Couple 1 seemingly youthful hands all but touch: a silent solidarity or emotion hovers between the two figures, while in Couple 2, though one figure faces away from the other—his face solemn, blurred—the space between them is filled with mute communication, tangible in its energy. Popoff paints snapshots, not only of the inner lives of her protagonists, but also the objects significant in their inner landscapes. In Model Airplane #1 and #2, colors stand out brilliantly in contrast with the impressionistic moments remembered throughout American Snapshot: the planes’ edges are crisp, defined in the rememberer’s recollections. Doll is treated with the same consideration as the portraits of children: less faded in memory than her human subjects’ faces, a doll smiles familiarly, her limp head leaning softly to one side. Even her dress and pinafore are remembered with specificity, displaying a fondness often abandoned after a child becomes an adult. Popoff’s tenderness toward these moments drawn from a child’s interiority are moving, connecting their viewer with long-forgotten sentiments. Set in doleful grey-blues, My Savior invokes a religious reference, yet with a sense of despair that is striking and immediate. The child, whose red hair rebels through the gloom of blues, projects another beloved: Felix the Cat stands amid the circling family, with their heads bowed and hands clasped in prayerful supplication. The child gazes upon this unseen familiar friend—a comfort in their wordless unhappiness. While melancholic adults pray for deliverance from their grown-up cares and suffering, Popoff’s small protagonist has their own longing for salvation.

Investigation of an American Present

Rendered in a palette of reds, whites, and blues, the cacophony of recollections—a polyphonic conglomerate of the unattended moments that remain strangely the most significant and ineffable— Popoff’s paintings contain snapshots not exclusive to the particular aspects of her own life. The artist does not only represent herself and her remembered peers, but also as-good-as-remembered peers; alongside her own memories, she transplants parallel lives and experiences. She sources from an accumulation of snapshots—collected photographs from unknowable sources—from which she then derives her subjects. Per her 2022 statement for American Snapshot the people in these found photographs are “those that [she] knows and those that [she] does not,” fragments of discrete lives captured before their assimilation into an adult world. American Snapshot series displays a many-voiced, collective past in 80 small pieces, each painted atop paper ephemera, found fragments kept for their memorial significance. Individual images—snapshots from a multiplicity of lives—are preserved in wax, a technique that heightens their sense of the retrospective, the remembered. To Popoff, these are intimate moments that portray an internal view of childhood not exclusive to herself. By pulling from lives beyond her own, folding them into an amalgam of hers with others, she is surveying a larger population even more representative of the subject: they represent an American childhood. The artist visualizes the link between these individual remembered moments of lived experience with a collective trauma within American culture, one that she describes in her statement as “present and unresolved.” She uses an examination of small lives to “make sense of,” to see the whole. For Popoff, dynamics like “family, memory, and socio-psychological dynamics” are overlooked in the search for understanding ourselves and our present times.

In Conclusion

In this body of work, children are protagonists existing in a complex, antagonistic and world not built for them; by seeing through a child’s gaze, Popoff interrogates the relationships between adults and children from their own perspective. Within this point of view, devotion for their companions—humans, animals, beloved toys and characters—constructs a private inner terrain, while their quiet deviations from the expectations and requirements placed upon them are self-protective acts. American Snapshot is an investigation of this topography, iterating the moments that remain—softened by the passage of years—within the memory palace of the child-turned-adult’s mind. Trauma, shame, indoctrination, and loneliness coexist here, where Popoff tenderly remembers the way things were for them within a world not their own.

American Snapshot

artist statement

The work in this exhibit includes work from the last three years. During this time I have been looking at images of Americana: doll collections, gun collections, antique furniture, clothing patterns, model home kits, yearbooks, toys, etc.. Perhaps as an instinctive response to try to make sense of our current culture by looking back. Or maybe, to find connections that may explain why our history seems so present and unresolved. More recently, I have been gifted a large collection of vintage snapshots that allowed me a more intimate look into America’s past. My current paintings and drawings use these photos as a reference to try to capture the essence of American life – with emphasis on family, memory and socio-psychological dynamics.

My creative life has been most influenced by my childhood and the injustices that I felt in the two areas that dominated during that time: my home life and my Catholic school education. The social dynamics of these two realms overlap in ways that fuel my desire to bring to light abuses of power. My work addresses social concerns, often pertaining to children, animals and others in powerless positions that are susceptible to manipulation.

Houses and clothing are recurring images my work. They allow me to address issues of being human without the presence of a specific person. They are intimate representations of those that I know and those that I do not. They are sacred spaces of joy and pain.

Kelly Popoff

2022

KELLY POPOFF

Artist and educator, Kelly Popoff, was born in Akron, Ohio and lives and works in Greenfield, MA. Kelly’s recent honors include: Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship in Drawing 2020, The Clowes Fund Fellowship and Residency, Vermont Studio Center 2019, Millay Colony Fellow 2018, The Artist’s Resource Trust Fellowship and Residency, Vermont Studio Center 2017, The Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation Grant 2017, a Promise Award from the Sustainable Arts Foundation 2016, Finalist Award from the Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship in Painting 2016. Recent solo shows include At Home with Our Histories at The University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, O Children at Herter Gallery, The University of Massachusetts and Rock on Doily at Augusta Savage Gallery, The University of Massachusetts. Kelly has exhibited in international group shows including shows curated by jurors such as Carter E. Foster (Curator of Drawing at the Whitney Museum of American Art), Richard Klein (Director of the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum), Trenton Doyle Hancock (contemporary artist), Camilo Alvarez of Samson Projects, Rachel Wolff (art critic and writer) and Deborah Rockman (contemporary artist).