Tatana Kellner is the artistic director of the Women’s Studio Workshop in Rosendale. Her own work ranges from printmaking and photography to artist’s books and installations, focusing on subjects drawn from her personal history and reflection on contemporary events.

Born in Czechoslovakia, Kellner and her family fled Prague when Russian tanks rolled into the city in August 1968. When she arrived in Lima, Ohio, she initially sufferwed from intense culture shock, but she ultimately enrolled in art school, where she first studied painting, and printmaking. She eventually moved to Rosendale after graduate school in the early 1970s and founded the Women’s Studio Workshop with Ann Kalmbach and Anita Wetzel, in 1973.

Kellner’s reflections on topics ranging from the Holocaust (her parents are both survivors) to 9/11 strike a balance between the largeness of the events and the intimacy of a personal engagement, often emphasizing the materials she works with, and the processes to which they have been subjected. Her most recent installation, Iron, looks at the history of women’s domestic labor, printed screened photographs of antique irons, on the backs of crisp white shirts in invisible ink. The images are revealed by the heat of an electric iron, also part of the installation. This work is on display through September 7 at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, part of its summer show of regional artists. Portfolio: www.tatanakellner.com.

TATANA KELLNER ON HER WORK

Mass and Multiplicity
It’s the printmaker in me—I’ve always liked working in multiples. I find pattern and repetition interesting, and also mass. How do you obtain some kind of substantiality out of that?

I went to school in the ‘70s, when they didn’t teach you anything. It was all about the business of art, or you could do anything because it was conceptual art. I was in painting, and decided I wasn’t learning anything in that class, so I figured that in printmaking at least I would learn a skill. I went to graduate school for painting, but the teachers there weren’t that good either, so I moved back into printmaking. The idea of multiples of things are not so precious, and make the work more affordable—all those elements are important issues for me.

I have this love-hate relationship with the multiple. Obviously, I like the idea of having the multiple, I like the processes, but at the same time, the repetition [of making them] becomes tedious. When it’s something like an installation, it’s different. It involves a lot of research, and solving problems, which can get frustrating on the other side. My working methods and my work are about that sort of dichotomy. I want things to be slightly mysterious, not completely defined. That’s why I don’t do straight photography. Don’t get me wrong, I love to see that sort of thing, but it’s not for me, not my work—it’s too defined.