Born and raised on the front range of the Colorado Piedmont and a resident of Colorado’s Western Slope, in her work Grace Kennison explores the relationship to land, animals, self, and iconography within the real or imagined American West. Her recent paintings articulate reflections on settler colonial history and reimagine the symbols and stories that compose our shared understanding of the West. Kennison seeks to frame “the West” as a psychological space where ideas about freedom, identity, and land threaten to eliminate or warp real histories, perceptions of self, and our relationship to the world around us. Her work often references the surreal as a way to visually relate to the grand illusions the Western genre has to offer.