Keren Kroul

Artist Statement

I mine memories for fragments of belonging and desire, moments of personal identity waiting at the edges of things: patches of summer sunlight on my grandmother’s bedroom floor, streaks of deep indigo in the sea at dusk, the rough texture of an old carpet under my feet. These ephemera are repeated and layered, twisted and tangled, becoming dense formations, map-like places of memory and identity.

Drawing is at the heart of my work. With watercolor on paper, I use tiny brushes to mark the passage of time in a meticulous, repetitive, and meditative process. Lines become shapes, then patterns, and then structures, hovering over the silence of the paper. I am drawn to the immediacy of watercolor, and to the reflection of the hand in the work: irregular and imperfect and of the moment. The play between micro and macro, the fragility of the single line against the physicality of the overall piece, and the fluid interconnectedness of memory, time, and place, drives the work.

Keren Kroul was born in Haifa, Israel, to an Argentinean father and Israeli mother, and grew up in Mexico City and Costa Rica. She currently resides in Minnesota. She holds an MFA in painting from Parsons School of Design (NY) and a BA in fine arts from Brandeis University (MA). Her work was featured in the 2014 Minnesota Biennial at the Minnesota Museum of American Art (MN), and has been exhibited regionally and nationally. Kroul is a recipient of a 2015 Artist Initiative Grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board.
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About Posit Editor

Susan Lewis (susanlewis.net) is the Editor-in-chief and founder of Posit (positjournal.com) and the author of ten books and chapbooks, including Zoom (winner of the Washington Prize), Heisenberg's Salon, This Visit, and State of the Union. Her poetry has appeared in anthologies such as Walkers in the City (Rain Taxi), They Said (Black Lawrence Press), and Resist Much, Obey Little (Dispatches/Spuyten Duyvil), as well as in journals such as Agni, Boston Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Conjunctions online, Diode, Interim, New American Writing, and VOLT.