Artist: Ceara Tellez
Exhibition Title: Leave No Trace
Exhibtion Dates: March 22-26, 2027
Reception and Gallery Talk: TBD
Bio:
Ceara Tellez is a painter and printmaker working in the southeastern United States. Her work is an examination of the local landscape and tensions between the natural world, human interference, and an evolving terrain of memory. Her work draws influence from photography, poetry, collage, the history of botany and scientific colonialism, and ecologic deterioration.
Born and raised in Colorado, she received her BFA from Colorado State University in 2017. Ceara is currently pursuing her MFA in Studio Art at the University of South Carolina. In addition to her graduate program studies, she teaches Introduction to Painting courses and recently completed the SHARPGrads program at USC. In 2025, she was a Rare Books Teaching Fellow at the Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. She is also the recipient of the McCausland College of Arts and Sciences Graduate Enhancement Award.
When given the opportunity, you can find Ceara wandering regional botanical gardens and exploring many of the extraordinary state parks in the Carolinas.
Artist Statement:
As a painter, my work intertwines my past and present, blurring the borders of where I came from and where I am. In the act of attuning myself to my environment, I confront the mortal anxiety of transition and impermanence. Absorbing the visual and atmospheric details of the space around me happens through a meditative process of observation. The temporality of my surroundings and the fixtures within have been a long-standing fascination of mine. This awareness is both a continuous source of stress and an intrinsic part of what it means to be alive.
My practice studies these moments both as they were and how they are recontextualized through memory. I work with a variety of processes and materials. Through painting, drawing, printmaking, and collage, I am afforded the ability to revisit ideas and imagery, allowing them to develop and shift with each iteration. The simple act of revisitation means that I can curate, deconstruct, manipulate and re-construct my memories. The process is an ongoing exchange between past and present iterations of myself. In this way, my artwork contemplates the ways that place, time, and memory intersect, and how they are constantly reshaped by the acts of recollection and revisitation.