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Kelsey Webb is a self-taught photographer, painter and musician living in Squamish, British Columbia.
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Two Songs at the Xanthine's Chess Game

Kelsey Webb cannot be easily pigeonholed into one movement or style. With abstractly based photographs, loosely narrative paintings and quirky still lives, his work is gleefully eccentric. Humour and a sense of play are important in the work. Whatever is in Kelsey's head at the moment works its way into the work, whether it is music, a book he is reading, or in one painting, the popcorn he was eating and how it resembled Umberto Boccioni's bronze Unique Forms of Continuity in Space.

Webb concocts his work not only from a medley of what he sees around him, but a collection of what happens to be inside his head. This assortment of information is connected into a loose open-ended narrative. Webb says of his process, "searching and finding interesting material within a ten-foot radius of wherever I'm standing, for me, is a lot more challenging and rewarding than would grabbing my materials, jumping on a plane and flying to the Taj Mahal." The results of his search for material can be humorous or strange, and Webb delights in the strange.

His paintings are based on images from his photography of his surroundings, but his photography that is not turned into paintings is mainly abstract, based on formal concerns of colour and composition. In his paintings, everything seems to be very solid; perspective is measured and lines are produced without wobble or indecision.

Work that is more recent reorganizes objects and buildings in various perspectives, with less of an interest in narrative and more in formalist juxtapositions of colour, form and texture. Mixed media comes into play in some instances, with objects such as chicken bones glued onto the support or the use of photo transfers.

Colour is used subtly and sensitively to create mood and atmosphere in the works. Mood ranges from irreverence, such as bean sprouts labelled with hieroglyphic luggage tags, to haunting meditations on death in a work depicting a tent shelter in Vancouver's downtown east-side.

Individuality and following his own methods are vital to Webb; "I think the main task for the modern artist is to find one's own voice — that part of their personality projected into art that is uniquely theirs."

Julie Beugin