dredge/drej/v. is the first solo exhibition by artist and facilitator Kellen Wright. Through dedicated doing, undoing, and redoing, Kellen investigates the emotional throughline of the habitual. This exhibition presents viewers with an elaborate queer visual lexicon centering speculation and abstraction of the written word, cartography, and landscape painting traditions.

To dredge is to bring up, to drag out the bed of a river. As the Mississippi flows not far from both the Cunst Gallery and Kellen’s home, this exhibition asks for excavation, for the micro and the macro to be held simultaneously in a relationship mediated by flux.

Works included are:

Pastoral Beauty Queen; broadside zine, traced writing, xerox collage, books the artist may or may not have read in the past year or so, bricks found on walks to work; 2023

Tower Grove Park with Pink Sky and No Buildings; watercolor and gouache on canvas; 2022 

Gays and their Oblique and/or Obtuse Translations that Might Only Mean Something to Them (Its Not a Gatekeep-y Thing, just a Thing We that we Acknowledge You Might Not Want to Take the Time to Learn)(Don’t Feel Like You Have To); gouache monotypes, wood type tray; 2023

Will The Cardboard Start To Look Like Sandstone, The Plastic Like Granite, The Litter Like A Prehistoric Sea; homemade walnut ink from Kansas City that finally ran dry this year, amber shellac, colored pencil, oil stick, sycamore branch; 2023 

this drawing has lived in three different studios (and at least 3 houses), a university campus, and, was started in my creepy uncle’s house in Affton; gouache, watercolor, charcoal, oil stick, colored pencil, acrylic paint, grommets, airplane cable, matte gel medium, various papers; 2021-23 

For Faye; photographs of the garden at my apartment in various states throughout the past months; 2023