Feminine Feminist Femme Fatale

Fort Lauderdale native Kelcie McQuaid has been busy with her art. She had her first solo show this past February at the former Bubble (now Jump the Shark) and was featured during Adam Matza’s record-release party in October at Two&, a show for which she created 46 new mixed-media pieces. In September, she created art for French indie pop singer Soko’s U.S. tour. McQuaid’s mixed-media works — paintings she creates with ink, acrylic, gel medium, and Mylar — are typically portraits of women in strong poses or in representation of a strength. Her women are pop-art outlines in bold strokes, their frames and features accented while the rest of their bodies are transparent, not in some heady juxtaposition of strength and weakness but as an ethereal window into the cosmic matter these women come from. This new collection of feminine portraits “explore[s] the softer side of feminism… with instinctually seductive layers of acrylic drip-work,” says McQuaid in her news release. What McQuaid doesn’t mention is the cheekiness of wordplay in the show’s name. A woman might be a “delicate” flower under some barbarian opinions and according to some societal mores that’d prefer that conviction; her women — possessed by astronomic matter, lay waste to fields of filmy cobwebs with flamethrowers. Hers are the women who land on comets, not the ones who follow Kardashian shenanigans. “Gossamer: An Exhibition of Mixed Media” by Kelcie McQuaid opens at Art Attack, 807 NE Fourth Ave., Fort Lauderdale, behind Radio-Active Records, on Saturday from 6 to 10 p.m. Evan Rowe’s Rizzletron will perform live, and an after-hours DJ set by M80 will follow the reception.
Sat., Nov. 29, 2014