Ride or Die
Danka Latorre and Madelyn Kellum
February 21st - April 7th, 2025

KB is proud to present Ride or Die, featuring Madelyn Kellum and Danka Latorre. The exhibition invites viewers into a vivid exploration of the teenage girl’s complex relationship with media, desire, and identity. Through distinct yet interconnected approaches, both artists explore the way girlhood is shaped by digital culture—where aestheticized suffering, obsessive romance, and media-fueled longing blur the line between fantasy and self-perception.

Danka Latorre’s photographic works expose the friction between self-image, objectifcation, and agency in an era where beauty and brutality coexist on the same algorithmic plane. Using labor-intensive alternative photographic processes like gum bichromate printing, she distorts and reclaims appropriated imagery drawn from Instagram infuencers, flickr, American Horror Story fan edits, and early-Internet shock media. Her work revisits the visceral, unregulated internet of the 2010s—where hypersexualized femininity, pornography, and graphic violence appeared side by side—shaping subconscious biases and internalized misogyny. By reprocessing these images through historical techniques, Latorre disrupts their original function, questioning whether women can ever fully escape the gaze that commodifes them. Her prints exist in a state of contradiction: both a reclamation and a critique, a meditation on complicity, control, and the enduring legacy of digital trauma.

Madelyn Kellum’s paintings operate in a similarly liminal space, where memory and media blur into one another. Her large-scale, abstract fgurative works merge digital and physical landscapes, drawing from an upbringing in hurricane-ravaged Southwest Florida and an adolescence spent in the intoxicating unreality of online hyperconnectivity. Through a process of digital collage, heat transfer, and layered oil paint application, she constructs dreamlike environments where personal nostalgia and cultural mythos intertwine—a childhood bedroom dissolving into a club in New York City, a suburban parking lot invaded by alligators. Kellum’s use of thick impasto, translucent washes, and hand-carved linoleum stamps referencing intimate personal motifs—fractals from a dragonfy’s wings, the pattern of a worn-in dress—evoke the way aesthetics shape emotional memory, reinforcing the desire to inhabit a version of reality that is more cinematic, more intoxicating, more real than the real.

Though working in different mediums, Kellum and Latorre share a deep engagement with the aesthetics of longing, self-destruction, and media-driven desire. Both artists explore how young women internalize the narratives they consume—whether through the tragic heroines of television or the aspirational couples of Tumblr—and how these fantasies embed themselves into reality. Latorre’s work engages directly with the raw material of digital culture, breaking down and distorting the hyper-slick, algorithm-driven images that shape feminine self-perception, to protect the girls that no one else looks out for. Kellum, on the other hand, approaches these themes through the language of painting, layering, and memory, pulling from both physical landscapes and digital spaces to refect on how desire manifests over time. Her works feel cinematic—like dream sequences pulled from a childhood television screen, blurred by time but still emotionally potent. In Ride or Die, these two practices converge to ask– What happens when we can no longer separate fantasy from self? When longing becomes more real than love itself? And when the characters we once admired begin to dictate the way we move through the world?

Ride or Die navigates the space where fiction becomes aspiration, where aesthetics dictate emotional reality, and where the echoes of youth continue to haunt adult life. The exhibition becomes a confrontation with the fantasies we were given and the realities they created.