Facing Kilimanjaro

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Lori Kella’s Seven Summits Series depicts the tallest mountain on each continent. Using photographs and maps pulled from the internet as her references, Kella painstakingly constructed and painted paper replicas that she staged in front of her camera. The artist says of her work, “there is always a tension between the created fiction, the actual, and what is believable...in the end these images are photographs of drawings of photographs of iconic summits. The images are three times removed from the source, and therefore pale approximations.” Kella parallels her own artistic efforts to what she describes as the “continual desire to achieve greatness” embodied by climbers who rigorously train and make repeated attempts, with rare success, to scale the summits she simulates in her photographs.