Keily Anderson Staley, Double Sun, 1/1, 2022, C-prints Inkjet Silver Gelatin Photocopy Silkscreen Cyanotype and Ink on New and Found Papers, 58 x 88 inches

Keliy Anderson-Staley is a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, a 2008 New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow and a 2013 George and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation Fellow. Her work has been exhibited widely, including at Akron Art Museum, Bronx Museum of the Arts, , Cedar Rapids Museum of Art Portland Museum of Art, Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Southeast Museum of Photography, Shelburne Museum and Riverside Art Museum. She is Professor of Photography | Video at the School of Art, University of Houston.

These works are park of “exploded autobiography,” that incorporates my photographs alongside paper documents I recovered from the off-grid Maine cabin where I grew up before it was burned by its new owners. I print directly onto my source archive, forming palimpsests on which the layers challenge and erase each other, creating new associations. I walk a thin, uncomfortable line between total obliteration of the original archive and preservation — highlighting certain parts of the family history to tell the story from a self-conscious, subjective, feminist perspective. My process of making and remaking, taking apart and reassembling, define an idea of family history as an evolving story, in continual flux. Beyond its autobiographical elements, the work explores how public history and private archives intersect and how individual identities are forged in the context of broader cultural developments.