Body Series
Ongoing project in collaboration with Dana Schnell
Know Pain Know Gain Coaching
June, 2025 - present
During the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic lockdown, I created four paintings which I now call The Body Series. I’d been let go from my first job post-graduation and was consumed by the uncertainty of my future at what felt like the most crucial moment in my life. These paintings were emotionally rendered with feelings of isolation; I imagined the four sides of the canvas were the four walls of the tiny rented room I was quarantining in, and the body depicted therein was me.
For Dana Schnell, my paintings struck a chord. Dana was my middle school volleyball coach and one of my role models as a girl growing up with an active lifestyle in Wisconsin. Having struggled with migraines and knee pains for the majority of her life, Dana found herself taking more and more things off her enjoyment list rather than adding things. Sometimes with chronic pain, people go into shut-down mode since everything seems to hurt all the time. Anything to avoid pain. Her journey, like mine, was deeply isolating as her body went into protection mode; for some of her pain, there was a misfiring of neurons, or neuroplastic pain, which is a result of changes in the nervous system, not tissue damage. For Dana, the book The Way Out: A Revolutionary, Scientifically Proven Approach to Healing Chronic Pain by Alan Gordon and Alon Ziv changed everything. Alongside her coaching business, Dana started hosting group discussions about our access to agency in the face of chronic pain. As she starts her new business, Know Pain Know Gain, she’ll utilize my paintings from The Body Series to spark discussion around our bodily autonomy, isolation and the resilience we all have within.
It’s truly an honor to know my art is helping others, especially in a context of healing both mentally and physically. As we discussed our partnership and collaboration, Dana and I marveled at our shared yet different experiences brought on by The Body Series. Through Dana’s dedication to helping others, I hope my artwork continues to support healing for those who are affected by chronic pain.
Reaching Fronds
Solo exhibition, Lois Vranesh Gallery
February 17 - March 29, 2025
Reaching Fronds is a body of work composed of oil paintings, mixed-media works, and photographs with themes of pooling water, plant bodies and deep introspection. This is Kendall's second solo exhibition and is on display at the Lois Vranesh Gallery at the Paradise Center for the Arts in Faribault, MN from Feb 17- Mar 29.
Statement:
My work is influenced deeply by the natural world. Plant-life takes on an anthropomorphic role in my work, persisting alone as a fluid subject or interacting as a companion or adversary to the human subjects in these narrative-based pieces. The element of water is ever-present, symbolizing an embryonic safety pooled in vessels for relaxation and retreat for the body. My work stems from a physical and mental compulsion for completion, symmetry, and aesthetic balance.
Using a process based approach, my multi-layered, curious practice is inspired by the overlap between opposites and the universal action of reaching, growing, and wanting solace and nourishment. How can our external bodies experience leisure and enjoyment while our minds are simultaneously in peril? Reaching Fronds explores this dichotomy, pushing and pulling at the idea of the mind and the body, separation and wholeness, human and plant– and the uncanny, yet beautiful, closeness of these opposites.
Dreaming Blue,
Burning Red
Solo exhibition, Supercharged Printmaker Gallery
October 3 - November 1, 2024
Kendall creates visual artwork which examines the subtle relationship between opposites through romanticized, dreamy aesthetics. In her multi-layered, curious practice, Kendall is inspired by the dichotomy at play between intense emotions, like delight and horror, and how these opposites can exist concurrently in a single moment. Dreaming Blue, Burning Red brings together paintings with opposed distinctions in both color palette and emotional feeling. Lush, vibrant environments in tranquil blues oppose luminous, intensely lit depictions in red.
In her work, state of mind teeters on the knife edge, visually existing in the liminal where this element of closeness creates a doubling. Kendall’s contrasting work intentionally emphasizes the dual self, and explores the conflict of the mind in which concrete authenticity and truth, especially in terms of identity, become ambiguous and loose. Referencing her own experience with identity dysphoria, painting allows her to investigate how a person’s physical and mental presence in the world can be malleable and fragile.
Public Art
August 2023 - Present
Over the past two years, Kendall has been participating in public art festivals including the Downtown Minneapolis Street Art Festival, the Museum of Wisconsin Art’s Annual Chalk Fest, and Richfield Minnesota’s Annual Penn Festival, where I created a collaborative community chalk mural with festival attendees. Public art has become increasingly important to her life as an artist in addition to her studio practice.
Penn Fest, Richfield MN 2024
Downtown Minneapolis Street Art Fest 2024
Museum of Wisconsin Art, West Bend WI 2024
Downtown Minneapolis Street Art Fest, MPLS MN 2025
Penn Fest, Richfield MN 2025
Museum of Wisconsin Art, West Bend WI 2025
SK Coffee
Solo exhibition, SK Coffee Uptown
September 1 - October 31, 2024
Project in collaboration with SK Coffee in Uptown, Minneapolis.
Camera Roll
Installation, Casket Arts #309
September 2023
Statement:
Creating Camera Roll, I combine a part of my art-making process, printing reference photos with my printer, with the exaggerated act of printing out my entire camera roll from the year 2020 in order to explore themes of making the personal public, our relationship with modern digital commodification of “photos”, and how this type of personal archive could act as a stream of consciousness or self portrait of an individual.
Camera Roll conceptualizes digital identity in the physical world. I’m interested in the way a photo on our phone is never really a physical object. Taking a photo is sometimes a compulsive behavior of consumption in order to obtain a shareable image on social media apps often garnering dopamine-boosting likes. “Pics or it didn’t happen” is a common phrase in our digitized world. Taking photos on a phone is addicting and has little consequence until your storage runs out. I’d like to explore what happens when this messy trove of digital pixels, often personal and meant for the phone holder’s eyes only, becomes realized in the physical world.
The Life of a
Painting
Feature Documentary, John Schoolmeesters
Premiere September 22, 2023
Life of a Painting is a documentary short created by filmmaker John Schoolmeesters about the process of creating a painting. Schoolmeesters premiered his debut film on September 22, 2023 in the same studio where the film was shot in collaboration with the film featured artist, Kendall Laurent. The short documentary film by Shallow Seas Media follows an emerging artist throughout the creation of a single painting over the course of two years. Laurent, a Minneapolis-based artist, works to balance her artistic integrity, a 9 to 5, and her own idea of ‘success’ as she begins to build a career as a full-time artist. The film explores what it means to find success on your own terms in the face of uncertainty.
