McKenzie Phelps

McKenzie Phelps is an artist working in Bloomington, Indiana. She completed her Master of Fine Arts at Indiana University in Fibers and her Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Nebraska Omaha. In her current research she considers creating imagined environments in fiber that exist somewhere in an abstracted physical and alternative realm. In considering themes such as dreaming, pleasure, hedonism, and self-actualization, she looks towards a bleak future and imagines a dream-like alternative. Imbuing a playful queerness through narrative and material choices, she blurs the line between reality and simulation. In this distortion of representation between what’s real, what’s represented, and what’s a representation of something real, she aspires to imagine flourishing queer futures. A former Artist-in-Residence at the LUX Center for the Arts in Lincoln, Nebraska, McKenzie has shown locally and regionally; including the Museum of Nebraska Art, and the International Quilt Museum.