Most Nearly Perfect Ham

Kelda Van Patten

May 2 - 31, 2026

Biomorphic watercolor shapes restlessly loop and collapse across sheets of roughly cut paper, while gestural black lines race through, suggesting mouths, limbs, and faces without ever settling into them. Fragments of identity surface, provoke, and dissolve. Outdated magazine pages are cut, torn, and reassembled. Irreverent still lifes and performative self-portraits punctuate the exhibition: an obscured face dissolving into purple light, a worn tube of concealer, an estrogen patch, a gold heart necklace, a duct tape figure with unblinking googly eyes, and the gaze multiplied and made absurd. Kelda Van Patten finds strength in the precarious and imperfect: tape seams catch the light, folds of soft pink fabric conceal and expose, and a red pipe cleaner quietly resists a smile.

Kelda Van Patten is a Portland, Oregon–based artist who creates disorienting pictorial spaces through still life, collage, drawing, animation, and photography, blurring reality and artifice. She holds a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, an MFA from the Pacific Northwest College of Art, and an MAT from Lewis & Clark College. She has received grants from the Regional Arts and Culture Council and completed residencies at Kala Institute, Jentel, and the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology; her work is held in the collection of the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation and in multiple private collections.

Most Nearly Perfect Ham is funded in part by the Regional Arts & Culture Council.