A friend took me to The Art Institute in Chicago. The museum has an amazing collection of Joseph Cornell's boxes. The drama here is my own truth. Everything in that gallery hit me so hard that I had to walk out. I kept coming back - tears spilled. I got it - understood it! I felt like Helen Keller learning her first word and the discovery exploded into a new language for me. I understood Cornell's language for the first time on an intuitive level. The works were about pain, joy, restriction and hope. If ever you could believe that a dead man could take you by the hand and show you a new way, I believed it on that day. I felt invited to place my building block upon his. This new body of work is about deconstruction; it is about giving up, and adding to, it is about change and translation. It is about faith.
Excerpt from a Pioneer Press review of Kellie Rae's Prayer Boxes by Thomas O'Sullivan:
Kellie Rae Theiss' nature-based artworks take viewers outside the gallery, outside the city, to closer encounters than the typical landscape painting. A Nebraska farm girl turned big-city gallerist, Theiss has long devoted her academic painting style to Midwestern nature. In her current exhibition, Theiss enters a new element, showing wall-hung and tabletop constructions that combine paintings and carvings with nests and branches inside wood boxes she has found or made. The box format allows Theiss to play painted illusions of space and substance against literal enclosed spaces, some housing actual branches and carved bird forms. "Lock and Key," a simple foot-wide box painted in warm sunshine hues, features five dragonflies. Three are painted, and two are actual specimens she has varnished for permanence, inviting the viewer to compare her painting with the subject painted. Faint pencil lines hint at her painstaking technique of sanding, drawing and painting that undergirds the apparently rustic boxes.
"This is a little bit about romanticizing what we've lost," Theiss observes. Her work draws on not just the natural world — she researched songbirds at the Bell Museum, among other places, to hone her representations — but also on the human, built environment as well. Century-old wood from a dismantled schoolhouse near Theiss' cabin supplied the weather-textured boards on which she paints birds and mounts nests. Old wood cheese boxes with ghostly lettering become reliquaries for carved bird forms and eggs, with painted skies decorating their interiors. The gifts of friends and family members, the wood "has a history, like most of us," she says. In her gentle transformations, Theiss has filled these cast-off materials with skill and feeling.