KEFE is the expansive partnership between Kelly Tunstall and Ferris Plock: artists living and working with San Francisco. In their world, every plane functions as both portrait and landscape.

Plock and Tunstall’s body of work surfaces the strange joys that can come from balancing interaction with a wider world and making more with more. It’s a show about trust: in our bodies, our cities, our eyes, in order to better observe coincidences and broadcast them to a higher relevance. 

The two have developed a shared language to describe the essence of invisible relationships, painting transects that contain chance encounters with cats, kids, orchids, skateboards and seascapes. Tunstall and Plock take turns extracting observations, echoing forms, and releasing characters to redirect energy across narrative arcs through their serendipitous realms. 

This dialectic ritual is central to Tunstall and Plock’s natural curiosity and love of process as both a means and an end. 

While their spaces and materials are shared, their individual gestures have their own electric modes of operating. Tunstall’s painterly figures belong to a spiritual order; an extended family of adaptive sirens, shrimp, and plants- dynamically hovering above, below, and within, dissolving hindrances to human perception in the natural world. 

Plock’s fractal figures thrust through space, defined by finding power and renewal in transition, prismatic color, and their sheer will to keep going. Tunstall’s veiled protectors dance with Plock’s auratic heroes like a nocturne for daytime. The work glows even brighter in the dark. 

Kelly Tunstall and Ferris Plock are set firmly at the center of California’s new contemporary movement, combining Tunstall’s elegant surrealist leanings with Plock’s deep roots within San Francisco’s respected skate culture. 

REPRESENTED BY

HARMAN PROJECTS, NY
HASHIMOTO CONTEMPORARY, NY & SF
TALON GALLERY, PORTLAND
BLACK BOOK GALLERY, DENVER

KEFE | EXHIBITIONS

FERRIS PLOCK | EXHIBITIONS

KELLY TUNSTALL | EXHIBITIONS