Eleanor Foy & Grace Kennison: Trick Pony

Trick Pony is a two-person exhibition featuring new works by Eleanor Foy and Grace Kennison. Both artists’ works examine the complex histories that have shaped the American West. Employing the visual languages of Western films, tourism, kitsch, and mass-produced objects, Foy and Kennison seek to analyze and critique the power dynamics established through settler colonialism between people, animals, and land in the West.

Eleanor Foy is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Athens, Georgia. She holds a BFA in ceramics from the Kansas City Art Institute and is currently an MFA candidate at the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia in Athens. She has exhibited nationally, including at the 2022 NCECA Annual Exhibition at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, California. Raised in the south San Francisco Bay Area, the landscape and mythology of California and the American West continue to inform her work. She is interested in how vernacular language and domestic objects express cultural values and seeks to unpack the complicated layers of meaning in seemingly mundane images of Americana.

Grace Kennison is a painter living and working in Ridgway, Colorado. She earned her BFA with a concentration in drawing from Colorado State University in 2018 and has exhibited her work nationally, most recently at Winston’s, Los Angeles, and Visions West Contemporary, Denver. Born and raised in the Front Range region of Colorado, her practice stems from studies of Indigenous histories, settler colonial epistemologies, and the role of white women within the story of Western settlement. Reimagining the symbols and stories that comprise our shared understanding of the real and imagined American West, her paintings fabulate intersecting narratives and fantasies which reflect on the duration of myth, hyper-aestheticization, and romanticization of Western life and land.