Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Photography (photograms, camera-less photography), film, writing
Website: kleamckenna.com
Klea McKenna (born 1980, Freestone, California) is a visual artist, filmmaker, and writer based in San Francisco. She is currently a Guggenheim Fellow in Photography (2023) and is represented by EUQINOM Gallery in San Francisco. Her photograms are held in the permanent collections of SFMOMA, LACMA, the Getty Museum, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum (London), The Mead Museum of Art, and the US Embassy collection. She is the daughter of renegade ethnobotanist Kathleen Harrison and the late psychedelic philosopher Terence McKenna. She was co-founder and photographer at IN THE MAKE (2011–2015), an online arts journal that published studio visits with over 120 West Coast artists. Her first monograph, Witness Mark, was published by Saint Lucy Books in 2023. Her work has been reviewed in Artforum, Art in America, the LA Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Harper’s Magazine, Crafts Magazine (UK), and Elephant Magazine.
McKenna works primarily through camera-less photography — photograms made by placing objects or materials directly onto light-sensitive paper and exposing them to light. Her process is as much physical and performative as it is photographic: she exposes paper to rain, presses vintage textiles into its surface with a printing press, uses her body as an instrument, and works in darkness with light itself as her primary tool. Her series Rain Studies (2013–2016) captures individual rain events by standing in storms with sheets of photographic paper; Generation (2018) imprints the textures of women’s vintage garments onto silver gelatin paper to create embossed photographic records of fashion history; Rainbow Bruise (2020–2023) fuses bodily and optical experience through embossed photograms that evoke emotional resilience and sensory fusion. She also makes films and writes prose.
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