Katelyn Ledford

Another Gallery is delighted to present Pleased as Punch, a series of new paintings by Katelyn Ledford.

Dark, satirical, and violent meanings are layered into seemingly benign objects, experiences, and phrases.’ For Boston based painter Katelyn Ledford, the history of the phrase ‘Pleased as punch’ becomes crucial. The sunny saying has a strange past, with roots in the 17th century, where a traveling puppet show character, Punch, reveled in his abusive exploits. Overtime, ‘Punch’ became ‘punch,’ and the specificity of the reference was forgotten, settling into the sediment of our collective culture.

Ledford scrapes through the detritus, employing a range of painting techniques, from photorealism, impasto, and sculptural collage, invoking the work of Dutch masters, notebook doodles, and cave painting. Angsty teenage years and sharp sadness, the drone of sexism and beguilement are activated in works which are as compositionally eclectic as their subject matter. Death Trap (2022), the viewer rides shotgun in a speeding car, a bird pecks at the wipers beneath a cracked windshield, trees and the road bend with hysterical tunnel vision while the bird's plumage becomes vivid beneath a skull air freshener and pink fuzzy dice—omens of luck and death. In contrast, Eureka (2022) exposes the underside of a desk, adorned with anime-style drawings of eyes, chewing gum and a taped lighter, while horses and oxen, somehow burned into the composite wood surface, collide cave painting with the soul crushing boredom of middle and high school. Throughout, Ledford elevates ambiguity, presenting work that lets the viewer wade through the muck themselves, whether it be through the cracks of a chain link fence or down a sinkhole, a dented birthday cake, or in the humid desires of a shut-in teenager. Meaning doesn’t have to play nice, and Ledford, rather than explain herself, revels in the emotional, referential tangle, which charges forth from the surfaces of her canvases.

Katelyn Ledford is a painter from the American South now based in Boston. Ledford holds an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island and a BFA from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, in Birmingham, Alabama. Ledford has been featured in exhibitions internationally with solo exhibitions at Aishonanzuka in Hong Kong and DUVE Berlin in Germany in 2021. Pleased as Punch is her first exhibition with Another Gallery and her inaugural solo exhibition in New York City.