Kellen Spencer: Unhomely

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Kellen Spencer, "The Value is in the Land (detail)," 2021

copperplate etching, chine collé. Courtesy of the artist.

The Gallery is offering free admission on Friday, Aug. 5 as part of Downtown Lethbridge’s First Fridays. Check out current exhibitions by Peter von Tiesenhausen, Azadeh Elmizadeh and Ella Gonzales, and Kellen Spencer, see what’s on offer at the Shop at SAAG with feature artist Darby Havrelock (see more on Darby below) and take in great deals at your favourite downtown restaurants and shops. We’re open from noon to 8 p.m. 

As both a word and an exhibition, “unhomely” embodies anxious and conflicting feelings towards homes as constructed things. Meaning a lack of intimacy or ugliness, “unhomely” was cited by Sigmund Freud as the source of the word unheimlich, the uncanny, or the familiar made unfamiliar. Kellen Spencer begins with the familiar shapes and constructions of residential homes and breaks them into unfamiliar building blocks. His copperplate etchings reduce the recognizable single-family home to desolate, stark, and sometimes impossible constructions of concrete foundations.

Within the depth of the Gallery’s library bookshelves, Spencer reimagines his etchings as three-dimensional landscapes. Propped in the shelves like a stage set, each miniature landscape anticipates the action to come, whether the construction of a home or its continued demolition. Each site is uninviting and barren, with no signs of human scale. As someone who works in the surveying industry, Spencer also sees the possibilities of these sites, of the future lives that could animate and shape each empty lot. However, the unfamiliarity of Spencer’s constructions also visualizes the very real anxieties and politics surrounding affordable housing.

Curated by Adam Whitford, Interim Curator

SAAG Art Library Project: In 2020, the SAAG began presenting exhibitions as in-situ interventions within our Art Library. The Art Library Project features a diverse selection of artworks and mediums from regional contemporary artists. Artists are invited to think of the library as a unique exhibition context by investigating the SAAG’s programming around readership, publications, and its place within Lethbridge’s historic Carnegie library which opened in 1922. Artists are encouraged to consider the physical architecture of the library and its material holdings, responding to a broader and generative idea of what a library might be, as they change and adapt to new forms of knowledge production.

Kellen Spencer is a Lethbridge-based visual artist and printmaker. In 2018, Kellen completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Print Media at the Alberta College of Art + Design (presently AUArts), and was the recipient of the Board of Governor’s Graduating Student Award. His printed works have recently been included in group exhibitions at VivianeArt, The Orillia Museum of Art & History, the John B. Aird Gallery and The Hall of Awa Japanese Paper Museum in Tokushima, Japan. Kellen currently works full-time in construction as a survey crew chief and CAD technician while maintaining his art practice out of his garage studio and the printmaking facilities at Casa.

This exhibition was made possible with funding assistance from the Canada Council for the Arts, Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and the City of Lethbridge.