Deep in the heart of July, I drove the beautiful back roads of Dutchess County to Wassaic for a studio visit with Danielle Klebes, who, aside from her artistic career, is the programming coordinator at the artist-run non-profit arts organization Wassaic Project. From the moment I arrived, Klebes welcomed me into her world with an open heart and kind demeanor. A lighthearted conversation ensued, all while her bright, neon-hued, psychologically infused paintings and cut-out sculptures vibrated as the backdrop.
Klebes's family moved about during her childhood, and she was often "the new person in a group," she comments. She spent her undergraduate years in Florida studying a range of subjects including art (she cites her time in Florida as highly influential and healing). Later she did her MFA in Visual Arts at Lesley University College of Art and Design in Cambridge, Massachusetts. After her years of schooling, Klebes participated in several artist residencies around the US, hitting 48 states while living out of her car (a Honda Element she fondly refers to as Elephant).
In the summer of 2019, Klebes visited Wassaic for the first time and she felt an immediate kinship. Knowing she had to return, she eventually scored her current position. Settling into a rustic home-studio on the edge of the woods, Klebes has since been producing a series of realist-cum-fantasy paintings and three-dimensional cut-out portraits of friends from all walks of her life. Using photographs as a guide, her studio is teeming with a dynamic social energy and a sense of connectivity among these intriguing characters. "The wooden cutout figures started because I was making paintings about feeling alone in a crowd and wanted to make that into a physical space," she comments. The layered piles of these life-sized people were a delight to behold, as if coming upon a dreamland filled with fascinating figures who will animate an impassioned story yet to unfurl. As described by the artist, these cut-outs are both documentation and portraiture, they are affectionate homages and "a physical reminder of all of the amazing people I've been lucky to spend time with" she says.
Klebes's art is a heartwarming blend of personal pride (the natural confidence of these characters) and seductive vulnerability (the ways in which these characters look fearlessly into our soul). Where her 3-D pieces isolate the intensity of these individuals, her "crowd paintings" (as she calls them) tend toward groups engaging in shared moments of sensitive eccentricity and intellectual complexity. Klebes's utopian visions of situations both familiar and strange are intriguingly fun, such as her painting Techno Parade (2018) that depicts a cavalcade of ravishing ravers who appear elated and exhausted by the spectacle of a night spent dancing and drugging. Another work, Bus (2023), features several friends inside a pink-toned converted vehicle, each staring off into space as if caught in a wrinkle in time—their collective soul-searching is palpable.
Her receptiveness to narrative pushes her style in curious ways, and she is a master at reconfiguring quotidian existence into painterly and sculptural pieces that tell terrific tales: Liquor bottles, trucker hats, leather jackets, and motorcycle helmets serve as props that tease out alternative histories. For a time Klebes rented an apartment from a "hyper-masculine" man, and her exposure to his life resulted in her desire to examine, as she puts it, the "borrowed spaces and borrowed objects" of that experience. On view through September 21, her installation "A Dyke Cabin of One's Own" curated by Elijah Wheat Showroom at Mother-in-Law's in Germantown, is an authentic encounter with Klebes at her strongest. Featuring playful paintings and cut-outs from Playboy magazines, taxidermy, beer cans, and provocative license plates in a teeny cabin at the edge of the woods, this country-vibe vision of assured lesbians enjoying boisterous times atop motorcycles in works such as Easy Riders (2024) and Let me run with you tonight (2024) is utterly amusing and full of joyful wit. Klebes discloses that "coming to terms with my sexuality" and her exploration of queerness has also been a part of her artistic process.
With Klebes's art we encounter both the individual and the community, both the private interiors and the public out-with-it performance. Her art celebrates the realness and rawness of the individual—and the crowd—in a way that asks us to join in the moment and consider the complicated layers of love in our own life. When I asked her about all these ideas in a follow-up correspondence, her response was stout: "My biggest secret is to be a fan of art to build an art community and get better at art is to really care about what other people are making."
