Glazed porcelain tile embedded in oil-sealed cherry artist’s frame

2025
13 x 6 x 1 in

Hanging keyhole and signature window on verso. A glazed tile drawing, embedded like a precious relic into cherry. The wood surface is sanded down around the porcelain, distorting the grain so that the image doesn’t stop at the tile’s edges, but rather seeps into the frame and transforms into a different sort of atmospheric drawing. The miniature scale insists upon private viewing: a visitor has to lean in close to peep the scenes as if through a keyhole in a door. In this scene, a coy performer peeks through the folds in a curtain, their face lit by a yellow spotlight halo. They are poised to speak at a microphone, but first expose their bare leg — warming the crowd up with a cheeky burlesque move. The wood grain echoes the billowing curtain, and rises in a tall arced valance.

Em Kettner (b. 1988, Philadelphia, PA) is an artist and writer based in Richmond, CA. Recent solo exhibitions include Homebound at François Ghebaly Gallery (New York, NY), Sick Joke at Chapter NY (New York, NY), Slow Poke at François Ghebaly Gallery (Los Angeles, CA), and Play the Fool at Goldfinch (Chicago, IL). She’s participated in two-person and group exhibitions at Pipeline (London, UK), Outer Space (Concord, NH), the MFA (Boston, MA), Form & Concept (Santa Fe, NM), Candice Madey (New York, NY), and Et al. Gallery (San Francisco, CA), among others. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; the Ohana Center, Monterey, CA; the DePaul Art Museum and The Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection, both Chicago, IL. Through July, new sculptures and drawings will be on view in a two-person exhibition at F2T Gallery (Milan, Italy), as well as in group shows at Pangée (Montreal, Canada), Secrist|Beach (Chicago, IL), Personal Space (Vallejo, CA), and Chez Max et Dorothea (Los Angeles, CA). Kettner’s work has been reviewed and published in Cultured Magazine, The Paris Review, ArtForum, Art in America, Sculpture Magazine, Contemporary Art Review LA (CARLA), HyperAllergic, Institutional Model, and Sixty Inches From Center. In 2023, Fulcrum Arts produced her interactive digital storybook, “Doctor, Doctor,” an illustrated journey through history, myth, and patient-hood.

Em Kettner earned her BFA from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is represented by François Ghebaly Gallery in Los Angeles and New York.