Kari Treadwell Ruehlen's work lies in between the space of personal history and American iconography. Autobiography becomes an important vehicle for different aspects of everyday life. Through her curiosity for common rituals, deeper meaning behind social behaviors and inherited symbols arise. Rather than relying on digitally fabricated means of production, she constructs objects and environments that are beheld through the camera’s lens. Sometimes the source happens to be re-enactments of activities that play a role in the slight and on-going changes of the self.
In recent years she has gravitated towards knots, nest, hair and flesh; evoking networks and the entangled weight of ordinary objects. Over the course of six years she obtained, collected and held on to personal documents, including bills, credit card statements, letters, junk mail, and bureaucratic forms. Several projects began with this amassed material, including photographs of nests located through out various domestic spaces, addressing the way in which we hold onto, protect, or become attached to personal data, even when it no longer serves us. Her work ultimately aims to portray a momentary window into beauty through uncanny, altered behavior.
Kari Treadwell is orginally from Tucson, Arizona. She received her BFA from the University of Arizona with an emphasis of Photography in 2005 and her MFA from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 2011. Kari has worked at the Center for Creative Photography archiving some of the masters photographs such as Ansel Adams and processing right and reproduction requests. She has served as an university educator, teaching several different types of media including drawing, painting, sculpture, color theory, performance, video and photography.