prop your limbs / Kaitlyn Konkin

SNAP is pleased to present prop your limbs, featuring new work by Emerging Artist in Residence Kaitlyn Konkin. The exhibition runs from October 11 – November 15, 2025 at SNAP Gallery. 

Opening Reception: Saturday, October 11, 7-9 pm

Artist Talk: Thursday, November 6, 6-7pm

Artist Statement

prop your limbs engages with themes of documentation and memory – questioning the relationship between truth and fabrication in our understanding of the familiar. Leaning on printmaking’s ability for layering and repetition, the resulting work both reveals and conceals, distorting the clarity and accuracy that we assume vision to bring. Bringing together printed, painted and drawn elements, the process seeks to bridge the internal and external, using representation not to clarify or explain, but to evoke feeling and experience.

Foundational to this work is the unease and tenderness that looking closely brings. Inspired in part by catalogues of botanical illustrations and photography, these works build on the history of objective documentation and the separation of specimens from their broader environments. This act of isolating forms recalls the photographs of Karl Blossfeldt, who magnified natural structures to an intricate and uncanny level. Similarly, these figures are fragmented, compressed, pinched – like clay molded and manipulated by unseen hands – while resisting complete comprehension. What appears as a singular view depends on many, with their inconsistent light and unnatural angles slipping between clarity and distortion. Weaving between the lines of resolution and abstraction, limbs come into focus, allowing moments of distance and intimacy to layer and contradict.  

Referencing the body, hands tangle behind the back, feet morph into each other, shoulders jut out at unnatural and uncomfortable angles and the rest forms an amalgamation of semi-understandable shapes.  Figures resist the weight of gravity – yet integrate into their surroundings – taking cover in the warping of it all. These vessels gesture towards the unease and uncertainty that the body brings, at times disappearing into the background and at others, taking center stage.

This exhibition acts as a collection of memory and manipulated understanding. Through gradual layers these works explore the ways in which our emotions and memories have a tendency to misshape and alter. Scenes and figures are constructed from a repository of imagery and the emotional weight that memories carry. Relating the artificial and the real, this work offers a passage to unusual scenes that beckon to be explored.

About the Artist

Kaitlyn Konkin (b.2001) is driven by her fascination with the ways we depict, scrutinize and understand bodies. She was born in Edmonton, Alberta, on Treaty 6 lands and holds a BFA from the University of Alberta. 

Working between printmaking, drawing and painting, her practice often engages with the abstraction and misrepresentation of familiar scenes and distorted memories. Much of her inspiration is drawn from the natural world, where ecosystems operate as intricate collections in their own right. She often looks to the structures, rhythms, and textures found in nature as guiding elements in her work. This attentiveness to organic forms informs her visual language, grounding it in both observation and transformation.