Prairie Lights will hold a reception for its current exhibit Electric Beach, featuring paintings by Thad Kellstadt, this Friday, Aug. 15 at 6:30 p.m.
Kellstadt lives in Iowa City where he works in a variety of disciplines: painting, sculpture, video and sound. In addition to his show at Prairie Lights, Kellstadt has shown in galleries both nationally and internationally.
The title for his new body of work, Electric Beach, was inspired by the name of a tanning salon in Coralville, and the show delves into the trippy perceptual tricks of Op art and retina-dazzling color schemes of psychedelia.
In this group of paintings, Kellstadt uses formal restrictions and chance operations to investigate concepts of abstraction and perception. Geometric forms, both gradated and uniform in color, overlap and collide. Some shapes become animate, like moveable parts in an imaginary apparatus. Other paintings take a daydream stroll through a geometric landscape that pulses with zig-zags, stripes and kaleidoscopic triangles. It’s almost as if Kellstadt has led us into a psychedelic Flatland.
Electric Beach will be on display at Prairie Lights until Sept. 7.
